Lenovo announce holy trinity of new tablets

The Lenovo Ideapad K1, Ideapad P1 and the Thinkpad were officially announced yesterday. They will go on sale in the US next month, with a European release date loosely scheduled for autumn.

As the summer reaches its somewhat anticlimactic peak, many computer manufacturers rally themselves for the new season. Lenovo has come out all guns blazing, announcing the launch of three new 10.1 inch tablets. The Lenovo Ideapad K1 and Thinkpad will run on the latest Android 3.1 Honeycomb version, while the Ideapad P1 will run on Windows 7. Users will also get 2Gb of free Lenovo cloud storage with each of the three tablets.

The Ideapad K1 is probably the most entertainment-friendy of the three. It will be powered by an Nvidia 1GHz Tegra 2 processor, and have more than 40 pre-loaded apps (including the irrationally popular Angry Birds). It’s also the first Honeycomb tablet to be certified for use in connection with the online film rental service Netflix.

“Lenovo tablets can help turn every night into ‘movie night’, Lenovo said in a statement.

It’s intriguing that Lenovo have included a Windows 7 tablet option (the Ideapad P1) in their three-pronged launch. The computing community is pretty much in consensus that Android is the only OS good enough to run tablets. It will come with a Stylus-style digitizer pen.

The Thinkpad is presumably the business option out of the three, but not much more is known than the fact that it will have the same processor as the K1, as well as the digitizer pen for data entry and pen-typing.