Ashton Kutcher is on stage right now in New York, and as a new “Lenovo employee” (ugh), he announced the new Lenovo Yoga tablet: a nifty little Android tablet with a battery that lasts a whopping 18 hours.
The Yoga is a cute little 8-inch tablet that can be configured into three different viewing modes. It’s a wedge-style design with one thick edge designed to be held, and one super-thin edge that’s almost reminiscent of a blade. If you envision an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard with a screen, you’re halfway there.
That thicker edge of the device is designed so that the Yoga Tablet can be held more efficiently in Hold Mode, while also stashing a flick-out hinged stand for the aptly-named Stand Mode. The tablet stand can also be used upside down on a table in Tilt Mode for better typing.
It comes in both 8-inch and a 10-inch models, packing a 1280×800 screen resolution, a quad-core 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera
Lenovo is promising that with those specs, it will pack in 18-hours of battery life. That’s a pretty bold claim that we’ll have to test when the device comes into our labs for a review.
The Yoga tablet also comes with a microUSB-out port so you can harness that enormous battery power to charge your other devices.
The 8-inch model will cost $349, while the 10-inch model will cost $399. That’s pretty expensive for an Android tablet these days, but Lenovo is hoping that the design ships units.
From an initial hands-on, it looks like the Yoga tablet is running a heavily modified version of Android, making it look like a half-way point between the Kindle fork of Android and true Ice Cream Sandwich 4.2. There’s also an app drawer that pulls itself out to display apps and media, with content changing based on the mode you’re using it in. That won’t get annoying at all.
The Lenovo Yoga tablet will be the first Yoga device coming to Australia and it lands on store shelves in JB Hi-Fi exclusively next week.