Lenovo to show tablets at CES

Lenovo are due to show their first tablets at CES to try and chip away at market share, currently under domination by Apple with their hot selling iPad.

Lenovo have said that they will show two consumer tablet products at CES, held between January 6th and 9th at Las Vegas. Nick Reynolds, director of global marketing at Lenovo said that the products will be targeted at consumers at multiple price points. One of the tablets could even be the ‘LePad' which is based around Google's formidable Android operating system.

Lenovo have strangely showcased other tablet designs before, but none of them released the market. Some of you will remember the IdeaPad U1, a hybrid PC that incorporated a detachable touchscreen that could be used as a tablet. The device was due to ship in the second half of 2010 and cost under $1,000, but it never appeared.

Lenovo have also been rumoured to release a ThinkPad tablet for the business sector to help compliment their laptop models.

By now we all know that everyone wants to get into the growing tablet sector, as sales climb through the roof. Apple are estimated to sell 54.8 million iPads in 2011, which seems like an extremely high number to us.

Other manufacturers jumping on the tablet bandwagon are Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Research In Motion and Toshiba. Gartner have also said that tablets could displace around 10 percent of PC units by 2014. Lenovo's Reynolds was asked if he felt tablet sales were damaging the laptop market and he said that they affect netbook sales, but not sales for their mainstream machines.

“Slates, netbooks are quite similar in terms of consumer usage habits and the consumption of media, but we're very confident it's not going to affect our notebook sales.”

KitGuru says: 2011 seems to be the year of the tablet, a year after Apple had their success.

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