Lenovo has unveiled a new contender in the budding Windows 8 tablet wars this evening—its new ThinkPad Tablet 2 is an Atom-based affair that runs Windows 8 Pro and will be released in October near Windows 8's own October 26 launch date. The business-oriented tablet will come with a stylus, and an optional dock and ThinkPad-style keyboard complete with TrackPoint nub will also be available according to Engadget.
As reported earlier this week by The Verge, the tablet's other relevant specifications include a 10.1" 1366x768 display, a 64GB solid state drive, 2GB of RAM, optional HSPA+ (or LTE on AT&T) wireless support, front- and rear-facing cameras, HDMI output, NFC, and about ten hours of battery life. All of this will come in a package that weighs about 1.3 pounds and is 9.8mm thick. This isn't a powerhouse by current desktop or laptop standards—the RAM, especially, seems anemic for an x86 PC—but it may be an appealing tablet for users and businesses turned off by the features missing from Windows RT.
The original ThinkPad Tablet used an ARM processor and ran Android, but the Tablet 2 will be running new 32nm Atom processors (codenamed Clover Trail) optimized for use in tablets. Clover Trail is directly related to the Medfield processors we saw pop up in Android phones like the Xolo X900 earlier this year, but a second processor core and a more powerful PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU add some extra oomph for the larger form factor.
These Atoms should be more or less competitive with ARM in both processing power and power usage, but with the notable advantage of being able to run x86 code. This is less of a selling point on a phone running Android, but it makes all the difference in the world on a tablet running Windows, especially if pricing is comparable to Windows RT tablets. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait and see if this is the case—Lenovo has yet to provide pricing information for the Tablet 2.
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