14 DAY TRIAL // The tablet PC market is one segment of the IT industry which, according to recent reports, Lenovo means to acquire a significant stake in as quickly as possible.
The exact classification of tablet-type devices into tablet PCs, media slates or other monikers is still somewhat vague.
Still, they at least can be seen as a segment of the IT market all on their own, especially with how quickly they grow in variety and prowess.
Lenovo is one of the companies that seek to establish a strong foothold in this area, not that there was any mystery to this.
What the consumer base did not necessarily know, however, was just how big an ambition the outfit really has.
According to Digitimes, Lenovo isn't much interested in conserving the market share it already has.
Instead, the company wants to go forward as fast as possible and see its items sold in a great number and a fairly short time, for the short term at least.
For those that want numbers, the existing shipment goal is somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million tablet PCs.
The IdeaPad K1, A1 and other consumer slates will account for most of those, between 1 million and 1.5 million to be exact.
The IdeaPad A1 is a 7-inch unit that will start selling at some point this month (September 2011), for the price of $199.99 (about 145 Euro).
It has an ARM CPU, 8 GB of storage space, GPS and the Android 2.3 operating system (Gingerbread).
The remaining 400,000 to 500,000 will be business-oriented models, whether 'true' slates or versions with keyboards, for medical, professional, industrial use, etc.
Most of these, if not all, will run a version of Microsoft's Windows and, thus, will feature hardware configurations based on Intel's or AMD's CPUs (central processing units) or APUs (accelerated processing units).