Difference Between Lenovo IdeaTab S2 and Apple iPad 2

The CES 2012 can be considered as the pinnacle of consumer electronic shows all over the world. The manufacturers are eagerly waiting to unveil their newest products while tech savvy fans are eagerly waiting for the gadgets to be tested out. It’s only a day away and yet the suspension has built up substantially. Some manufacturers are trying to unveil their products just before the CES to grab more attention and even though some official specification records needs to be released, the pre released information is often reliable. One such product is Lenovo IdeaTab S2 Tablet. Lenovo is undoubtedly one of the best manufacturers of laptops and their ThinkPad series is owned by world renowned professional software engineers. Thus the knowledge on mobility may be their specialty and we have yet to see how they would perform in the tablet and smartphone market.

Normally when a tablet is compared, the benchmark is taken as Apple iPad and in the recent times Apple iPad 2. This is because Apple was integral in sudden boost of popularity in Tablet devices with their debut device iPad. It is indeed rather task oriented and extremely user friendly. For this reason, we would compare the newly released Lenovo IdeaTab S2 with Apple iPad 2 to understand how Lenovo has performed in their new tablet release.

Lenovo IdeaTab S2

The Lenovo IdeaTab S2 is to have 10.1 inches IPS display with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, which would be a state of the art screen panel and resolution. It will have 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 8960 dual core processor with 1GB of RAM. This beast of hardware is controlled by Android OS v4.0 IceCreamSandwich and Lenovo has included a completely modified UI called Mondrain UI for their IdeaTab.

It comes in three storage configurations, 16 / 32 / 64 GBs with the ability to expand the storage using a microSD card. It features 5MP rear camera with auto focus and geo tagging with Assisted GPS and while the camera isn’t that good, it has decent performance verifiers. IdeaTab S2 will come in 3G connectivity, not 4G connectivity, which certainly is a surprise and it also has Wi-Fi 801.11 b/g/n for continuous connectivity, and they claim that this tablet can control a smart TV so we assume they have some variation of DLNA included in IdeaTab S2, as well. Lenovo IdeaTab S2 comes with a keyboard dock that has some additional battery life as well as additional ports and an optical track pad. It’s such a good addition and we reckon it would be a deal changer for Lenovo IdeaTab S2.

Lenovo has also made their new Tablet rather thin scoring a mere 8.69mm of thickness, and 580g of weight, which is surprisingly light. The inbuilt battery can score up to 9 hours as per Lenovo and, if you hook it up with the keyboard dock, 20 hours of total battery life is guaranteed by Lenovo, which is a very good move. 

Apple iPad 2

The much reputed device comes in many forms and we are going to consider the version with Wi-Fi and 3G. It has such elegance with its height of 241.2mm and width of 185.5mm and the depth of 8.8mm. It feels so good in your hands with an ideal weight of 613g. The 9.7inches LED backlit IPS TFT Capacitive touchscreen features a resolution of 1024 x 768 with a pixel density of 132ppi. The fingerprint and scratch resistant oleophobic surface gives an additional advantage to iPad 2 and the accelerometer sensor and Gyro sensor comes in built as well.The particular flavor of the iPad 2 we have chosen to compare has the HSDPA connectivity as well as the Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n connectivity.

The iPad 2 comes with a 1GHz dual core ARM Cortex A-9 processor with PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU on top of Apple A5 chipset. This is backed up by a 512MB RAM and three storage options of 16, 32 and 64GB. Apple has their generic iOS 4 responsible for the controls of iPad 2 and it also comes with an upgrade to iOS 5. The advantage of the OS is that, it’s correctly optimized to the device itself. It isn’t offered for any other device, thus the OS does not need to be generic like android. iOS 5 is thus centric on iPad 2 and iPhone 4S which means it understands the hardware perfectly well and optimally manages every bit of it to give an awesome user experience without the slightest bit of hesitation.

Apple has introduced a dual camera set up for iPad 2 and while this is a good addition, there is a large room for improvement. The camera is only 0.7MP and has poor image quality. It can capture 720p videos @ 30 frames per second which is good. It also comes with a secondary camera bundled with Bluetooth v2.0 that would please the video callers. This gorgeous gadget comes in either black or white and has a sleek design that just pleases your eyes. The device features Assisted GPS, a TV out and famous iCloud services. It practically syncs over any Apple device and has the element of flexibility included in it like no other tablet has ever done.

Apple has bundled the iPad 2 with a battery of 6930mAh, which is quite bulky and it features an effective time of 10 hours,which is good in terms of a Tablet PC. It also features a lot of niche iPad based applications and games taking advantage of the unique nature of its hardware.

Conclusion

The conclusion here is going to be pretty obvious. In fact, the conclusions about the new products unveiled at the CES would normally carry weightage towards the newly introduced product because these manufacturers research the market for previous mistakes and rectify them before a new release. So they are usually improved versions of existing handheld devices. We reckon the hardware of Lenovo has a very strong base to compare with any device that comes in his way for a long time. It is also slightly thinner and less weighted than the other counterparts, so obviously our choice would be Lenovo IdeaTab S2, although it has some significant blowbacks in the newly introduced UI.