Difference Between Apple new iPad 3 and Lenovo ThinkPad

Apple new iPad 3 vs Lenovo ThinkPad | Speed, Performance and Features Reviewed | Full Specs Compared
 

A human life is never interchangeable under any circumstances. We can just replace a human, but it would never be the same. One wouldn’t ever be able to think someone else in the place of someone they loved and held so dearly. That is the human nature and diversity. On the other hand, if we take any product, they can be replaced just as easily as anything else. All you need to do is find a product of the same specification. While this may be true for almost everything, because of the nature of humans, we may have trouble in letting go something of intimate value to us. One such thing as per observation is your mobile device. People do have trouble in replacing their mobile device with something else, mostly because of sentimental reasons, but partly because of brand loyalty. That is why we see people buying products of the same brand as successors for most of their appliances. They may have the perception that it’s because the products from that brand is the best which may not exactly be true although those products need to have a good reputation.

In any case, what we have been talking about so far is equally related to both of the products we are going to talk about today. Apple products are often presold even before they hit the shelves without much of a marketing effort. That is a form of brand loyalty and, we have to say, Apple is among the top brands in the world and perhaps the most celebrated brand in the mobile world. On the other hand, Lenovo has a good reputation in the laptop and mobile workstation industry. There are only a few computer professionals who would pass a chance to get their hands on a Lenovo workstation if they can help it. It equally follows that they would feel right at home with another Lenovo product in the tablet PC category instead of going for another brand. This is what Lenovo tries to build upon using their tablets; let’s see how much of a contribution do these tablets render towards making it a sound competition.

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 ThinkPad

Lenovo ThinkPad is one elegant tablet of its kind. It has 10.1 inches IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display that features a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels at a pixel density of 149ppi. It has an expensive look to it, but we are rather worried with its thickness and weight which scores at 14mm and 730g. This is far in the hefty side of the spectrum, and one would have a hard time holding this slate for a long duration. It is powered by 1GHz dual core processor on top of Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset with 1GB of RAM. The slate runs on Android OS v3.2 Honeycomb, and Lenovo doesn’t promise on an upgrade to v4.0 ICS, which is rather disappointing. It comes with three storage options, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB with the option to expand the storage using three types of memory cards. The hardware setup in ThinkPad is not exactly something we can boast about, but it would serve you well enough in anything.

Lenovo has included a 5MP camera in this slate, and it also has a 2MP front camera to be used for video conferencing. The connectivity is defined by HSDPA and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n comes into the picture as an additional method of connectivity. The difference between this and the rest of the Android tablets is that ThinkPad doesn’t feature the ability to act as a wi-fi hotspot nor does it has the DLNA functionality, and we reckon that might be because this is quite an old tablet released in July 2011. Apart from these, there’s nothing new to this tablet and, unfortunately, we don’t have the records for the battery life. Although I started this comparison saying the loyal fans will tend to purchase products from the same brand, Lenovo ThinkPad doesn’t seem to have made much of a progress at all. This may well be a consequence of the weight and the thickness of the device which makes it unattractive because other than that, I don’t think it had any flaws with respect to the time it was released.

Conclusion

Coming in to a conclusion in this scenario isn’t going to be difficult because these tablets are of different timelines. Lenovo ThinkPad was introduced to the market in July 2011 and, with respect to the standards of that window of time, it’s a good tablet. We wish we could blame the thickness and the weight of this tablet on that, but the market was flooded with rather slim tablets even then so it may have been a fault in the design. Besides the ergonomics, ThinkPad hosts a balanced hardware setup that can take full advantage of the host operating system. However, it lacks in connectivity, optics and resolution compared to the Apple new iPad. The new iPad is of course a lot better than ThinkPad understandably because the mobile world evolves much faster and a lot of things can change in 8 months. So in this case, our recommendation would be to go for the new iPad because it’s simply new and has better features than ThinkPad.