More Information

Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1 (Wi-Fi)

 

• Pros
  Fast performance. Good multimedia features. Clever button and camera layout. Physical Home button. Netflix is preloaded.
• Cons
  Prone to crashes. Thick. Lots of bloatware
• Bottom Line
  The Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1 is as good as its Android Honeycomb tablet competition, but doesn’t offer any game-changing differentiators that make it stand out in the ever-expanding tablet space.

 

There’s a palpable sense of déjà vu in the PCMag Labs these days. New tablets come in, but they all seem vaguely familiar, as if we’ve seen them before. The Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1 is no exception: on the outside and inside, there’s not a lot about this tablet that is unique. Lenovo offers a few tweaks  that might make it more compelling than some other Android-based tablets, but it’s more or less your typical Honeycomb tablet.  Like many of its Android 3.0 brethren, it’s fast and offers strong multitasking, but it’s no match for the reigning tablet king, the Apple iPad 2 ($499-$829, 4.5 stars).

The K1 comes in three color models—black and silver, red and silver, or white and silver—and costs $499.99 for a 32GB, Wi-Fi-only model ($519.99 for the black and silver model with a leather cover). That’s $100 less expensive than the same-capacity iPad 2, and is on par with the lower-cost Honeycomb tablets—the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 (3.5 stars) is also $499 for 32GB, while the Wi-Fi Motorola Xoom goes for $599. 3G models of the K1, as well as other size options (16 and 64GB) aren’t available yet, but should be soon, according to Lenovo.

 

View Slideshow See all (11) slides

More

Design
The IdeaPad K1 looks like nothing you’ve ever seen. Unless, of course, you’ve ever seen any other tablet on the market, in which case it looks a lot like all of those. The K1 is a glossy rectangle with rounded corners, measuring 7.4 by 10.4 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighing 1.61 pounds. It’s relatively thick as tablets go, but not quite at the level of the Toshiba Thrive ($429.99, 3.5 stars), and it’s heavier than most tablets but not problematically so.

Specifications

CPU

nVidia Tegra 2 Dual-Core

Processor Speed

1 GHz

Operating System

Google Android 3.0 or higher

Screen Size

10.1 inches

Storage Capacity (as Tested)

32 GB

Dimensions

10.4 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches

Networking Options

Wi-Fi

More

The K1’s closest visual analog is probably the original Apple iPad; they’re almost exactly the same thickness, and virtually the same width. The K1’s a little taller, though, and has a noticeably larger bezel. The large bezel makes it appear to be wider than it is—the screen is a 16:10, 10.1-inch, 1280-by-800 LCD, just like you’d find on the slimmer Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 ($499.99, 3.5 stars) or Motorola Xoom ($599, 3.5 stars).

There are some unique design elements in play on the K1, and they’re mostly good things. The colored back, along with a small bump on the bottom where the speakers are, provides a nice punch instead of the sleek-but-boring all-black look. The Volume and Power buttons, which are too-close to one another, are on the left side of the tablet when held horizontally, along with the SD card slot and rotation lock switch. Their location makes them easy to reach when you hold the tablet in landscape mode. There’s a headphone jack, HDMI port, and proprietary charging connector on the bottom panel.

There’s also a single hardware button on the right side of the screen, which we haven’t seen before on a Honeycomb tablet. That button, actually, is my favorite feature of the device. (That sounds odd, I know, but bear with me.) Honeycomb builds the Home, Back and Multitasking buttons into a black bar at the bottom of the screen, and that works fine, but the buttons move when you rotate the device, and you have to look for them to find them. One hardware button, always in the same place near where you’re holding the device, is a nice touch. Plus, this one has a few tricks up its sleeve. Tapping the button takes you Home; Swiping left, across the button, (if the button is at the bottom of the device, held in portrait mode), navigates backward; swiping right opens the menu; and pressing-and-holding the button takes a screenshot—a feature sorely lacking in Android otherwise. Unfortunately, it doesn’t wake the device from sleep—you’ll still need to hunt for the Power button.

The rest of the K1’s hardware reads like a Honeycomb requirements checklist: Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, front and rear cameras (2 and 5 megapixels, respectively), Bluetooth and Wi-Fi b/g/n. Lenovo says the battery will last up to 10 hours; our tests, which consist of turning Wi-Fi on and playing video non-stop, yielded battery life of 7 hours, 39 minutes.

Performance and Speed
When you put all the same pieces together, you’re probably going to get the same results. And that’s the reason the Lenovo K1’s benchmark performance looks an awful lot like all of the other Honeycomb tablets on the market. From browser speeds to Pi calculations to basic processing, the K1 is, simply, very fast. In practice, apps launched quickly, and there was little lag.

There was but one performance issue with the K1: In my tests, apps, along with the browser, crashed a number of times. Once, the tablet crashed completely and required a reboot, a problem I’ve never had with another Android tablet.

Honeycomb and Apps
We’ve already reviewed Android 3.0 “Honeycomb,” so there’s no need to delve into most of the operating system on the K1, which is standard Honeycomb with a few additions and tweaks. The nutshell version: Honeycomb is endlessly customizable, and wins big points for multitasking, Google integration, and notifications. With fewer than 300 third-party apps optimized for tablets, however, the Android Market remains one of the weakest facets of Honeycomb. In the app game, Apple is still king, with tablet-specific apps numbering in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds.

Some of the tweaks seem pointless, like Lenovo’s redesign of the on-screen Home, Back, and Menu icons, and others miss the mark, like the “App Wheel,” a carousel of your favorite apps that is awkward to navigate and puts an ugly, non-removable icon on the screen. Other changes are refreshing: I particularly liked the addition of a red “X” on the multitasking Layers window, which lets you kill apps with a single touch.

Lenovo added a number of widgets to the K1, one of which you’ll notice as soon as you turn the device on. Front and center on the home screen is a four-pane widget called Lenovo Launcher, which puts four common tablet activities in easy reach—Watch, Email, Listen, and Read—and provides easy access to the Browser and Settings. All have default functions (Listen launches a Slacker Radio app, for instance), but can be customized. Also present are widgets for toggling the microphone and speaker volumes, and for locking the device. All these widgets can be moved or removed, but they’re at worst harmless and at best pretty useful. There are five available home screens, all sparsely and seemingly randomly populated with apps and widgets, and you’ll probably spend the first five minutes of K1 ownership cleaning them up.

In addition to all the standard Honeycomb apps, Lenovo packs the K1 full of extras. There are entertainment apps pre-installed, like Netflix (the K1 is the first tablet to launch with Netflix support, though other tablets have it available now), Slacker, and mSpot; a bundle of games, from Hearts and Euchre to Warships and Galaxy on Fire 2; and a smattering of other apps like eBuddy (an instant messaging client), Photo Studio Paint (a drawing app), and eReader (an ebook reading app). Most of the third-party apps are just bloatware, and many are demos that urge to you buy but won’t let you delete; some do add real value, like Documents to Go, which normally costs $15.

Specifications

CPU

nVidia Tegra 2 Dual-Core

Processor Speed

1 GHz

Operating System

Google Android 3.0 or higher

Screen Size

10.1 inches

Storage Capacity (as Tested)

32 GB

Dimensions

10.4 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches

Networking Options

Wi-Fi

More

Lenovo also made a couple of applications specifically for the tablet. The Lenovo App Shop is a curated version of the Android Market, filled only with apps that are safe and reliable. (The entire Android Market is available as well.) Lenovo Social Touch is a hub for social networking accounts, allowing you to manage Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts all in one place. Again, they fall somewhere between mildly helpful, and a waste of an icon slot, but they’re easy enough to ignore if you don’t want them.

Cameras and Multimedia
The requisite pair of cameras are present here, along with the requisite middling quality from each. The K1’s front-facing camera is a 2-megapixel shooter, designed primarily for video chat. Chatting is a pleasant experience, mostly due to the integrated Google Talk app. The camera is on the top when you’re chatting in landscape mode, which is seems a more natural default on 16:10 displays. Mercifully, the camera actually faces forward, rather than the odd off-center tilt we’ve seen from tablets like the Acer Iconia Tab A500 ($449, 3.5 stars). Despite Google Talk being a strong app, don’t expect hiccup-free chats. No tablet, the iPad 2 included, offers seamless streaming video chat yet.

The rear camera is a 5-megapixel shooter, and captures 720p video. Both look fine—I take some issue with the fact that shooting photos or video on a tablet with a big tablet is bizarre in general, but if you want to do so, you’ll get decent, cell-phone-like quality photos or video. There are apps on the K1 that let you edit video and photos right on the tablet, which do make it slightly more compelling as a camera.

Multimedia features are a definite strength of the K1. In addition to the third-party apps like Slacker Radio, Netflix, and mSpot (which lets you rent and download movies), Lenovo redesigned the Android Music and Video apps, the most significant effect of which is that there’s finally a dedicated app for videos (previously, videos and photos lived together in the Gallery app). Both apps are simple, but work well. There are two stereo speakers on the back of the tablet, which are about average for a tablet—you’ll want some good headphones or external speakers. In addition to the internal memory, there’s also a micro-SD slot for adding up to 32GB of extra storage.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1 is a quality device, and it does have some minor advantages over other Honeycomb devices, like the multitask app killer. But none of its differences are game-changing enough to crown the K1 as the best Android tablet. The LG G-Slate by T-Mobile ($529.99, 3.5 stars), for example, has a 3D camera, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 has a laptop-type accessory, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is extremely thin. Besides the crashes I experienced during testing, there’s nothing major to complain about here, it’s just that the K1 is not game-changing, and none of the Honeycomb tablets we’ve seen can beat the iPad 2.