Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 review

Last time Lenovo called a tablet a ThinkPad, it apparently did so because there was nothing better to call it. It in no way recalled Lenovo's illustrious line of laptops, with their red-and-black color schemes, excellent keyboards, and love-it-or-leave-it TrackPoint nubs. It also just wasn't a very good tablet, and never made much of a dent in the market or in consumers' minds.

This time, it's fair to call Lenovo's tablet a ThinkPad. Partly because it's a "black box" — though if that were the only requirement, basically every tablet on the planet other than the white iPad would qualify — but mostly because an extra $119.99 buys you a Bluetooth keyboard / stand combo that will feel instantly familiar to anyone who's laid fingers on a ThinkPad laptop. Its six rows of "smile" keys, curved at the bottom and slightly concave, are just like those on the X1 Carbon and other recent ThinkPads. Since Lenovo only had the tablet's 10.1-inch width to work with, the keyboard is a little cramped: I look like I'm about to pounce on the keyboard, perched over it with all four fingers smashed together on home row. Lenovo maximizes the space at hand, though, and other than the slight claustrophobia of the whole experience I got used to typing on the ThinkPad Tablet 2 pretty quickly.

At first, I happily poked away at the touchscreen to open apps or jump through settings menus. Then came a moment I needed to deal with the tiny menus in the Control Panel: "to the trackpad!" I thought, before the horrible realization set in that there is no trackpad on the ThinkPad Tablet 2's keyboard accessory. There is only the TrackPoint, that red nub (or nipple, or whatever dirtier word you want to call it) that sits in the space between G, H, and B keys. If you want a pointer, you're either using the TrackPoint and the three clickable buttons below the space bar, or you're plugging a mouse into the tablet's USB port. Some people, particularly long-time ThinkPad devotees, love the TrackPoint; I am not one of those people. But I begrudgingly used it, and found that it may not be the worst invention in the history of technology after all. I used the touchscreen nearly all the time anyway, and the TrackPoint served me functionally when I needed it. But I still refuse to use it unless I have to.

The keyboard accessory is light and sturdy, and almost exactly equals the tablet's 0.34-inch thickness. It matches the tablet's aesthetic perfectly, down to the rough matte texture on the back and sides. The tablet slides into a groove just above the keys and rests comfortably against a pop-up flap in the accessory; they pair easily and automatically via Bluetooth, and the two parts work as well together as they should given that, you know, they're made for each other. They're not as sturdy as a laptop when paired together — the tablet fell out or slid off a couple of times — but I was able to use them on my lap, albeit at a slightly awkward angle to the screen. Carrying two parts around can be a bit of a pain, and I do wish there were a way to more securely dock tablet and keyboard for transport; the Atom-powered HP Envy X2 has a nice dock, but the best you can do here is buy a case (I used the $39.99 ThinkPad Tablet 2 Sleeve) that holds both. You can do without the case, but don't buy the tablet without buying the keyboard — neither feels complete without the other.

While I was using the ThinkPad Tablet 2, I became keenly aware of when and where other people used tablets. The most common place I saw tablets of any size was on the New York subway, but I was struck by the fact that while those with small slates — Kindles, Nexus 7's, iPad minis — were comfortable standing and using their tablet simultaneously, 10-inch tablets were almost exclusively the province of the seated rider.

Studies far more scientfic than mine have shown that few larger tablets leave people's homes — they're simply a more comfortable device for the bedroom, or the kitchen, or the couch, or the bathroom. That's not all the ThinkPad Tablet 2 is trying to be, though. This is a full-on Windows computer: unlike Windows RT devices like the Surface RT, which can't run legacy Windows apps and really only have a desktop to run Office, every Windows app is available to the ThinkPad Tablet 2. Of course, that doesn't mean they all work well.

I found myself using Evernote, Rdio, and a handful of browser windows at a time throughout my testing, and at various points opened up Office apps, Photoshop, and Quicken. (It is tax season, after all.) I also used about two dozen Windows Store apps, from the New York Times and ESPN to Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Fruit Ninja. For what I call "Grandma tasks" — browsing the web, watching videos, checking email, forwarding weird conspiracy theories to everyone I know, unintentionally making fonts huge and bold and Comic Sans — the device held up just fine, but as soon as there's a Photoshop-sized hurdle in front of it the ThinkPad Tablet 2 falls flat on its face.

The 1.8GHz Intel Atom Z2760 processor inside the ThinkPad Tablet 2 is part of Intel's Clover Trail lineup of low-powered chips, but the practical reality is this: I had more than enough time to make a sandwich in the interim between my double-clicking the Steam icon and the application opening. Not a Steam game, mind you, which would be large and unwieldy and thus forgivable in its delay — honestly you shouldn't expect most games to be playable on an Atom processor anyway. I'm talking about Steam, the small shell app that lets you play or buy games from the Valve store. I never even made it to actually playing a game, for fear of death by hopeless boredom while waiting for the game to launch. The ThinkPad Tablet 2 does fine with desktop apps as heavy as a Twitter client, and that's it – even Chrome, the browser I can't really live without, stutters and lags at every turn.