The Hewlett-Packard Touchpad sold like proverbial hotcakes when the electronics maker slashed the price from $499 to $99. Now Lenovo is entering the market with a tablet 
priced at what it hopes is the sweet spot: $200.
Lenovo just launched the IdeaPad Tablet A1 running Android 3.1. The new tablet features a NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core mobile processor for high-speed multitasking and web browsing. Adobe Flash Player is built in for gaming, and the device is touting low power consumption for longer battery life.
The A1 weighs just over a pound and a half. It comes pre-loaded with more than 40 apps from the likes of Amazon.com, Adobe Systems, Electronic Arts, Rovio and DataViz. Some of the notable apps are Angry Birds, the Kindle e-book reader, and Documents To Go.
Pricing Not the Only Factor
"There's no question that price matters, but what we learned from HP -- who discounted a $500 tablet to $100 -- is that people like $500 tablets that sell for $100. That's all you can take away from that," said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis, speaking from the IFA show in Germany.
He noted that $200 tablets already exist -- consumers can buy them at Walgreen's, but few do. As Greengart sees it, consumers looking for tablets want high quality. That, he said, is because a tablet isn't a device that most consumers need. Rather, it's something they want. And if a tablet is a want rather than a need, consumers aren't going to buy a tablet that doesn't live up to their expectations.
"I have not looked at the Lenovo tablet, so I don't know if it will live up to people's expectations as to what a tablet ought to be. But price alone is not enough," Greengart said. "Apple has done such a great job creating a good product at a reasonable starting price of $499 that competing solely on price and not providing a high-quality product is not going to work."
The Business Tablet
Lenovo also debuted the ThinkPad Tablet, a 10.1-inch tablet running Android 3.1. Lenovo promises the device will let users work productively and securely and enjoy plenty of entertainment in off times. The ThinkPad also takes a page from HP's TouchPad with a stylus, albeit a supercharged one.
The ThinkPad Tablet also draws from some popular features on other ThinkPad-branded devices that play to mobile users. Beyond the digitizer pen, the tablet sports a full-size USB port and an SD card slot, mini-HDMI for connecting to external displays, and a keyboard folio case with optical TrackPoint.
Lenovo touted more than a dozen partners and pointed to more than 250,000 apps in the Android Market as well as the Lenovo App Shop. But that doesn't touch the offerings from Apple's App Store.
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