Lenovo launches lightweight IBM tablet PC, price still

Lenovo Group, the Chinese company that recently bought IBM's PC business, has high hopes for the floundering tablet PC market. The company will announce today the IBM-developed, Lenovo-branded ThinkPad X41 Tablet, which it touts as being the lightest and having the longest battery life on the market.
The machine marks Lenovo's debut into the market and IBM's first tablet since 2001, when it launched TransNote that ran basic Windows 2000.

"There have been rumors that IBM has been interested in the market," said Brian O'Rourke, analyst at researcher In-Stat. "I would say [the Lenovo tablet] is somewhat a vote of confidence in the tablet PC form factor."

Despite its impressive specs the Lenovo tablet is costly next to ultra-lightweight notebook PCs. And its price tag likely will dampen demand. At $1,899, the ThinkPad X41 is priced on par with its tablet counterparts but is roughly $150 to $200 more expensive than comparable portable notebooks, O'Rourke said.

Price is largely why the tablet PC market has not taken off, along with a dearth of tablet software, O'Rourke said. Tablets represented just 1% of all notebook PC shipments globally in 2004.

Tablet computers in various, mostly unsuccessful, flavors have been around for years. But the tablet PC market really was born in the fall of 2002 when Microsoft Corp gave its blessing by releasing Windows Tablet PC operating system, O'Rourke said.

Until today, IBM had been a holdout in this market, O'Rourke said: The ThinkPad X41 is its first machine that runs the Microsoft Tablet PC platform.

Jeff Samitt, Lenovo segment manager for ThinkPad X, said IBM passed on the Microsoft Tablet OS back in 2002 because various software applications were not mature enough to drive the market. Microsoft has since upgraded its tablet OS a couple of times.

"We think the market is finally ready for the tablet device," Samitt said.

The ThinkPad X41 is 1.14-inches thick and weighs 3.5 pounds -- or 20% lighter than its 12-inch rivals such as Hewlett-Packard's TC4200, Toshiba's M200 and various Fujitsu tablets, Samitt said.

The Lenovo tablet has the longest standard battery life of comparable tablets, Samitt said. Equipped with a 4-cell battery, the machine can run for 2.6 hours. A higher-capacity 8-cell battery gives 6.3 hours of computing life, but brings the machine's weight up to 4 pounds, he said.

By comparison, Samitt said HP's TC4200 tablet weighs 4.6 pounds and lasts 5 hours on batteries. "Battery life is key in this market place," Samitt said.

However, whether the Lenovo brand will resonate in certain markets is not yet known. Indeed, the decision not brand it IBM may negatively affect sales in some regions. "IBM is a more familiar name in parts of North America and Europe," O'Rourke said. "There is a possibility that [the Lenovo brand] may not appeal to a tech-buying manager."

Lenovo's machine, which will be available June 14, can be used in two ways: as a writable slate with a digital pen or as a traditional notebook PC with a keyboard.

It also boasts a fingerprint swipe function, which takes electrical readings below the first couple of layers of skin. This is a more robust security feature than traditional fingerprint security pads, which use optical sensors to take an electrical image of a fingerprint. "I don't know of a way to spoof this particular design," Samitt said of the fingerprint swipe method.

Pharmaceutical, sales, insurance and real estate are target markets for tablet PCs.