Difference Between Apple New iPad 3 and Lenovo IdeaPad S 2

Apple New iPad 3 vs Lenovo IdeaPad S 2
 

It’s rather strange when you see some products become successful without any marketing at all whereas some products are being aggressively marketed, but still tend to be failures in the books. I’ve seen dozens of products like this fail in the market with no apparent fault in their designs. It is rather interesting to identify what motivates the consumers to buy the former products over latter products. Basically what people look at is the brand name and, if consumers are loyal to a brand, no matter what others have to say, they go and buy it. The image in their mind is so well established that those products don’t need excessive marketing; instead, they market themselves. It’s like the product concept in the marketing theory where they believed the product will sell itself if it is a great product. The distribution strategy is more of a pull strategy than push strategy because consumers wait for these products; they stay in the queues overnight to get to these products; they preorder these products more than the manufacturer can supply in the initial lot. It is a much acclaimed fact that Apple products fall into this category. They get fully preordered every time and scores one of the all-time highest sales. More than the Apple Mac PC and MacBook, it’s Apple iPhone and iPad that showed this trend in the market.

Amidst all these fast moving products, there are some products that don’t get along well with the customers. It’s not that they have a bad design or they don’t appeal to the customer, but they just don’t emanate glamor like Apple do. There are some products that fall between these two extremes. Today we are going to talk about a fast moving product, The new iPad from Apple and a product that is relatively new to the market, and we still don’t know where it will fit in.

Apple The new iPad (iPad 3)

There have been many speculations about Apple’s new iPad because it had such a pull from customer’s end. In fact, the Giant is trying to revolutionize the market again. Many of those features in the new iPad seem to add up to a consistent and revolutionary device that is going to blow your mind. As rumored, Apple iPad 3 comes with a 9.7 inches HD IPS retina display that features a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels at a pixel density of 264ppi. This is a huge barrier that Apple has broken, and they have introduced 1 million more pixels to the generic 1920 x 1080 pixels display which used to be the best resolution a mobile device provides. The total number of pixel adds up to 3.1 million, which is actually a monster resolution that hasn’t been matched by any tablet currently available in the market. Apple guarantees that iPad 3 has 44% more color saturation compared to previous models, and they have shown us some amazing photos and texts which looked wonderful on the big screen. They even cracked a joke about the difficulty of displaying the screens from iPad 3 because it has more resolution than the backdrop they were using at the auditorium.

That’s not all about it, the new iPad has a dual core Apple A5X processor at an unknown clock rate with quad core GPU. Apple claims A5X to offer four-times the performance of a Tegra 3; however, it has to be tested to confirm their statement but, needless to say, that this processor will make everything work smooth and seamlessly. It has three variations for internal storage, which is enough to stuff all of your favorite TV shows. The new iPad runs on Apple iOS 5.1, which seems like a great operating system with a very intuitive user interface.

There is a physical home button available at the bottom of the device, as usual. The next big feature Apple introduces is iSight camera, which is 5MP with autofocus and auto-exposure using a backside illuminated sensor. It has an IR filter built into it which is really great. The camera can also capture 1080p HD videos, and they have smart video stabilization software integrated with the camera which is a good move. This slate also supports the best digital assistant in the world, Siri, which was supported by iPhone 4S only.

Here comes another stabilization for the wave of rumors. iPad 3 does come with 4G LTE connectivity apart from EV-DO, HSDPA, HSPA+21Mbps, DC-HSDPA+42Mbps. LTE supports speed up to 73Mbps. However, currently 4G LTE is supported only on AT&T network (700/2100MHz) and Verizon network (700MHz) in the U.S. and Bell, Rogers, and Telus networks in Canada. During launch, the demo was on AT&T’s LTE network, and the device loaded everything super-fast and handled the load very well. Apple claims the new iPad is the device that supports most number of bands ever, but they didn’t say what bands exactly. It is said to have Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n for continuous connectivity, which was expected by default. Fortunately, you can let your new iPad share your internet connection with your friends by making it a wi-fi hotspot. It is 9.4mm thick and has a weight of 1.44-1.46lbs, which is rather comforting, though it is slightly thicker and heftier than iPad 2. The new iPad promises a battery life of 10 hours on normal usage and 9 hours on 3G/4G usage, which is another game changer for the new iPad.

The new iPad is available in either Black or White, and the 16GB variant is offered at $499 which is rather low. The 4G version of the same storage capacity is offered at $629 which is still a good deal. There are two other variants, 32GB and 64GB which comes at $599 / $729 and $699 / $829 respectively without 4G and with 4G. The preorders started on 7 March 2012, and the slate will be released to the market on the 16th of March 2012. Surprisingly the giant has decided to roll out the device in US, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland and Japan at the same time which makes it the biggest rollout ever.

Lenovo Idea Tab S 2

We need to start the review by mentioning that there may be certain ambiguities in the specification listed here for Lenovo Idea Tab S 2 since it’s actually not the official release. However, as the prior experiences suggest, these information are normally bound to be true. So let us proceed with them. The Lenovo Idea Tab S 2 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. Idea Tab S 2 will come in 3G connectivity, 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 Idea Tab S 2, as well. Following the footsteps of Asus, Lenovo Idea Tab S 2 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 concept to be replicated from Asus, and we reckon it would be a deal changer for Lenovo Idea Tab S 2.

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.

Conclusion

The brief comparison sums pretty much everything there is to compare about these two devices. As you can see, both devices will stay neck to neck in performance although we think Lenovo IdeaTab S 2 may be more powerful due to the new Krait processor and 8 cores GPU. We can only confirm this hypothesis after we perform some benchmarking tests against these tablets. Until then, let’s consider them to be equal in the range of performance. What keeps us going towards Apple’s direction is the monster display panel it has to offer us. I mean, 2048 x 1536 pixels is a resolution no mobile device has offered before, not even laptops as far as I know, so it’s definitely attractive. Other than that, the high end camera and the fact that it offers LTE connectivity may influence the buyers. The display panel in IdeaPad is not bad, but it just doesn’t match with that of The new iPad. Although this is the case, IdeaPad is surprisingly light compared to The new iPad that scores 580g where The new iPad weighs 662g. This may be an issue if you’re going to have it in your hand for a long time. Other than that, there’s nothing to make your decision any easier, but we can safely say, both of these would make great tablets.