Hands-on with the Lenovo ThinkPad 8-a tablet that means business


Driving two monitors through a USB 3.0 dock, the ThinkPad 8 is the tablet that thinks it's a desktop.
Sean Gallagher 
 
As CES was ending last week, I got a chance to pick up Lenovo’s new ThinkPad 8, an 8-plus-inch tablet that bridges the worlds of handheld and desktop. Designed for business use, the ThinkPad 8 is a little heavier than similarly sized tablets, and it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of strictly consumer options. But it does exceed the field as it can also plug into a USB 3.0 dock and become a respectable desktop machine—and it’s the first Windows 8 pure tablet that has made me think I might actually want a Windows tablet.

There are a few things that are fairly average about the ThinkPad 8. Its eight-hour battery life, when taken out of context, is pretty much standard in the Windows tablet field right now. It’s also a little heavier than most of its competition, weighing 0.9 pounds in its lightest configuration. Its back camera is a pedestrian 8-megapixel device, while the front-facing camera is a mere 2 megapixels—good for a Skype call, but not so much for self-portraiture.

Most of those somewhat banal numbers start to take on new meaning when you look at the whole package, though. The ThinkPad 8's 8.3-inch 1920×1200 pixel display is larger and higher resolution than other Windows tablets of its approximate size. It’s not quite the resolution of the current iPad Mini, but it's close enough that it’s not noticeable thanks to the responsiveness of the processor’s graphics engine. The screen has an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts screen contrast based on indoor or outdoor lighting, and its touch sensors support up to 10-finger touch gestures.

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