Lenovo ThinkPad 1838-25U 10.1″ 32GB Tablet (With Stylus)

So I ordered this tablet from the manufacturer and the ship estimate was about a month out, so I ordered it from Amazon instead and it shipped within the week. I got the product and I love this tablet,the stylus is great, the tablet feels sturdy, and it works great. I will say it is not as snappy as say the galaxy tab, but this has plenty of features that I think more than make up for it such as the as card reader, full USB port. It is much more professional than many other tablets and is well worth it

At the moment certain stores sell the 32GB model for under $520 so I picked one up recently and am blown away. The new Thinkpad Tablet is fantastic! It runs Honeycomb extremely well and the stylus input is perfect. I’m just waiting for more apps to make use of the pressure sensitivity and inking. However, even right now there are some good office/pdf apps that handle Microsoft Office formats for reading and editing which is exactly what I wanted to take notes in class.

Overall, it good for a PhD student to annotate papers and take notes for various talks, but the softwares need more works.

Pros:
1. Paper annotation: You can open paper in Dropbox and write your notes with the pen in ezPDF app, then all your notes will be automatically synchronized by Dropbox. You will never lose your notes on your favorite paper.
2. Note taking: Unlike others, I do not usually need handwriting recognition capability. Maybe most of my notes are in the form of mathematical expressions or graphs. Hence, I use Quill and Writepad to write my notes during talks. After back to my office, I will output those notes into PDF and put in Word documents and type additional comments for future references.
3. Email and Calendar: With this tablet, I do not need to sit in my office for a whole day. I can read my papers and books outside, and this tablet will remind me when an important E-mail comes in or I have a meeting within 15 mins. Good for your health!

Cons:
1. Gmail app: Horrible! You can only access E-mail in Inbox. You can not search E-mail or access E-mail with tags. Definitely need update from Lenovo. BTW, this tablet will NOT let you to install Gmail app from market.
2. Note Mobile app: Handwriting recognition is OK, but you can not rotate the screen to take notes. Also, not like Quill and Writepad app, Note Mobile does not have the option to disable finger touch, so sometimes your palm will leave marks on your notes. So, I primarily use Writepad app for notes taking.

Also, it will be fantastic if there is an app which can take notes and synchronize with Microsoft Onenote.

Animations are smooth, very responsive, in-built notes app leaves some features to be desired; but I feel like a better tablet-optimized note taking app will emerge after a while. MobileNoter does not take full advantage of the pen and simply acts as if it is a finger.

Two things that put it ahead of the game:

1. USB, not micro usb, but an actual USB port
2. HDMI

Now I can go on to tell you how smooth it performs. It performs VERY smooth.
The digitizer pen is awesome. With the digitizer pen and the notebook app, this can be a very functional note-taking device for a business person, college student, journalist, writer or anyone else who takes notes on a regular basis.
The digitizer pen is also good for artists; drawing and photo editing.
I can say that I have done a wide comparison of this and other tablets, iPad, etc.
I purchased before the iPad 3 was available, and I can say that I have no interest in using another tablet, or an iPad after having such a great experience with this tablet.

I actually thought it was a bit weighty, until I held an iPad, which actually weighs more.

This tablet works great. Stylus pen works great. Doesn’t appear to work with a 64 GB SDHC card. Documentation is very poor and Lenovo Support doesn’t appear to know what the capacity of the SD card slot is. Another gripe is no accessories. The keyboard that is touted to come with this tablet cannot be purchased at Amazon. If you try to order the folio keyboard case from Lenovo, it will be shipped in January 2012. No one can get their hands on the keyboard. It makes you wonder who is running a company that puts a great tablet out like this but with no accessories. If Lenovo wants to compete with IPAD then it better start getting some accessories at least available online and not backordered for 3 months. All that being said, I tried an Acer Iconia before this. It was just a big smart phone. The Lenovo tablet is actually useful for taking notes, editing PDF’s, signing documents etc. Not to mention that it is fast. Wifi also works much better than the Acer and the locking screen rotation is awesome. I just wish that you could use digital ink on more of the apps like docs to go and evernote. I hear evernote is working on it. Also tried Logmein Ignition for tablets on it. It worked great until I tried access the network with other than the internet. It locked me out of every program that needed net access. Had to do a factory reset after uninstalling Logmein for Tablets to get it back working. Once again, I love the tablet, just wish there were more accessories.

UPDATE: I just received my keyboard folio case October 28 from Amazon. The keyboard works great. However, the case is kind of hefty. I am using my old case most of the time. I really think just buying a bluetooth keyboard to have handy when I needed would have worked just as well. Also, the 64 gb card I bought is not supported. I am going to try a suggestion to format to FAT32 and see if that works. I don’t know if the card can be formatted like that though.

I have been using a Galaxy Tab for about a year and got tired of the small screen when viewing web pages – it’s just a little small for that. I looked around for a 10.1″ version and liked the Samsung, Acer, and Asus android tablets. For my purposes, the Thinkpad made the most sense. It’s bigger than the Samsung and is a little heavy compared to the other three, but the extra weight (which really isn’t that much) gets you quite a bit in functionality. The digital pen and note taking application is something I’ve been looking for for. It works well and the handwriting recog. is really pretty good even with my bad handwriting. Sometimes my writing is really bad, so I switch the app to not do the recognition and just record my pen strokes – a great feature! I can draw free hand figures, equations, whatever in this mode. I can export my notebooks to images or PDF; I prefer images with the freehand mode. I can save those images to my Dropbox folders, export them to Evernote, or save them any of several other ways. I may be truly paperless after I get used to carrying this thing around more often. I’m looking forward to the keypad folio and will buy it when it’s available. Battery life is really good, though recharging seems to take some time. I’m really enjoying this machine.

I have had the Thinkpad tablet for about 3 months now and have practically replaced notebooks with it. I work as a scientist and do quite a bit of work on paper.

Software:

The built in note taking software (notes mobile) is terrible, don’t even bother with it. It uses a “smart palm rejection system” that just doesn’t work whereas Quill only writes from pen input which is 100% reliable. It won’t let you rotate the tablet to the side (which is where I always write on it). I could go on and on about how awful this app is but I will spare you.

Quill is quite nice for note taking and is continuously improving (I am currently on 9.7). It does vector line drawings plus it has a straight line tool that was recently added. It can easily export notebooks to pdf and send them to a program to upload/store them (I usually either use SFTP to upload it to my server or email to send it to a coworker). Unfortunately the straight line tool does not have any settings to draw orthogonal lines or snap ends together. Also as of now there is no way to organize the notebooks into sub folders. But with these two additions I think Quill would be damned near perfect.

Astro pdf viewer is quite nice for pdf documents, you can draw on them with the stilus and highlight text. Unfortunately it doesn’t do great with palm rejection and there is no erase button, just an undo. Also the bookmarks won’t auto expand which is annoying for certain books in pdf format that list the chapters as 1 2 3 etc where you need to expand them to see the title.

One of my biggest complaints with Lenovo is that they are fighting tooth and nail to prevent users from being able to root their devices. The existing exploit worked with mine but I have heard that it isn’t 100% reliable. They cite some horrid excuse that their corporate customers won’t accept the risk of using a device that has been rooted.

There is a group working on cyanogen mod for it, at the time of this review they have everything except 3g, hardware accelerated video decoding (for high quality youtube), and the camera working. I have not tried it yet but I hear good things.

Hardware:
The hardware is overall decent, however my power button went out after a couple months worth of use. Lenovo fixed this quickly and with no charge to me.

It charges off a mini usb connector which is very nice since I can use the chargers I already have for my cell phone. But note that it charges fairly slowly off the cell chargers since they are lower amperage than the included one.

The keyboard folio is not great in my opinion. It makes for a mediocre case since you can’t easily fold it or remove the device for tablet style use and it has serious issues with lap/fuzzy surface use.

Battery life is decent, I can get a full day of writing/reading on it.

Annoyances:

You cannot turn up the back light when the battery is below 20% even if the device is plugged in.

The web browser periodically slows to a crawl and needs to be closed and re opened.

Whereas this is decent in terms of bloat there still is shovelware. Things like mSpot movies, PokeTalk, Kindle, etc. However it is nowhere near as bad as the Samsung galaxy S2.