Lenovo ships $349 IdeaTab S2109 tablet with Android 4.0

IDG News Service - Lenovo on Wednesday finally shipped the IdeaTab S2109 tablet after months of teasers, calling the $349 tablet one of the lightest in the market with a 9.7-in. screen.

The tablet weighs 576 grams and measures just 0.83 centimeters thick, Lenovo said in a statement. It is the first tablet that the company is shipping in the U.S. that includes Google's latest Android 4.0 OS.

The tablet is for entertainment, Lenovo said. It can play 720p high-definition video on its screen, but can play 1080p video on TVs connected via the HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) port. The tablet has a dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 chip with a clock-speed of 1GHz.

The S2109 will compete with tablets optimized for entertainment content and applications such as Apple's iPad and Asus' Transformer Pad 300 (TF300), which has a quad-core chip and is priced starting at $379. General-purpose tablets with dual-core processors under $400 that ship today are largely capable of handling 1080p video, but have lower resolution screens.

The S2109 offers 10 hours of battery life when used for video or web browsing, Lenovo said. The device has 1GB of RAM and up to 32GB storage. Storage can be expanded via micro-USB and micro-SD card slots.

The device also has a 1.3-megapixel webcam. Users will also get access to app stores from Lenovo and Google.

The tablet is available in the U.S., but the company did not respond to request for comment on worldwide availability.

Lenovo offers a range of tablets that includes the IdeaPad and ThinkPad tablets. The models came with earlier versions of Android but Lenovo has promised over-the-air upgrades to Android 4.0.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com