Difference Between Lenovo IdeaTab S2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

The CES 2012 has so far been a blast even before it has officially started with a lot of vendors’ pre releasing information about their cutting edge products. We are living in the vibe of tech savvy people trying to experiment with what appears to be the newest products in a highly evolving market. Right now we are ready to compare another one of those cutting edge prereleases with something that has been a benchmark in the community.

Lenovo has pre released information about their newest tablet, IdeaTab S2, and it sure seems to be a great tablet with wonderful ergonomics and looks. It also excels in performance, and comes almost to the top of the class. On the other hand, we have a more matured product of the much renowned Samsung Galaxy Tablet line, Galaxy Tab 10.1. It was released sometime back, and is not so cutting-edge right now, yet it has been a tablet that set the trend for a lot of tablets to follow. That’s not the only thing either, when we talk about Galaxy line, it’s a complete family of mobile devices, which fastens the glory of both Samsung and Galaxy as a family. Without further ado, let us look into these tablets individually and form a discussion.

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 Idea Tab.

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, and not 4G connectivity, which certainly is a surprise. 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 also 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. 

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Galaxy Tab 10.1 is another successor of Galaxy family. It was released to the market in July 2011 and at the time, was the best competition for Apple iPad 2. It comes in black and has a pleasing and expensive look with the desire to keep it in your hand. Galaxy Tab is thin scoring a mere 8.6mm, which is awesome for a tablet PC. Galaxy Tab is also lightweight with a weight of 565g. It has a 10.1 inch PLS TFT Capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 and 149ppi pixel density. The screen is also reinforced with Corning Gorilla glass, to make it scratch resistant.

It comes with a 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 dual core processor on top of NvidiaTegra 2 chipset and Nvidia ULP GeForce graphics unit, which tends to be more powerful. The 1GB RAM is a due addition to this setup, which is controlled by Android v3.2 Honeycomb and Samsung promises an upgrade to Android v4.0 IceCreamSandwich, as well. It comes with two storage options, 16/32GB without an option to expand the storage. Unfortunately Samsung Galaxy Tab LTE version doesn’t come with GSM connectivity although it has CDMA connectivity. On the other hand, it has LTE 700 connectivity for super-fast internet and also Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity. Since it also supports wi-fi hotspot functionality, you can handsomely share your super speed internet with your friends. As mentioned above, been released In July and having LTE 700 connectivity certainly helped it a lot to gain the market share it has gained through this 5 months and we have to say that Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a matured product you can rely on.

Samsung has included a 3.15MP camera with autofocus and LED flash but this kind of seems inadequate for the tablet. Fortunately it can capture 720p HD videos @ 30 frames per second and for the delight of the video callers, it has a front camera of 2MP bundled together with Bluetooth v2.1. It comes with the normal sensor set for the Galaxy family and has a predicted battery life of 9 hours.

Conclusion

As glorious as Samsung Galaxy family is, their tablet has become less cutting-edge throughout the time. That is nothing to blame on Samsung, but to be blamed on the highly evolving industry where something would be cutting-edge today and lose its position tomorrow. That’s exactly how the mobile market is. In the case of Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, it has been serving as a benchmark tablet for quite some time in its glory days, and it still is a good tablet to be recommended for. But with new tablets on the block like Asus Transformer Prime and Lenovo IdeaTab S2, Galaxy Tab is losing its grip fast. That been said, the conclusion will be biased towards investing in Lenovo IdeaTab S2 since it’s new, excels in almost all the performance factors compared to Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. We don’t have the exact information about the pricing schemes for Lenovo IdeaTab S2, so we won’t be involved in investment tips, but we can safely guarantee that if you’re going to invest in Lenovo IdeaTab S2, you will have one great tablet at your disposal that is only second to Asus Transformer Prime TF201. Of course, if your interest lies in getting yourself a decent tablet that can serve you well with almost anything, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is still a great choice too, the only blowback been it’s not cutting-edge anymore.