Lenovo planning to release a 23-inch tablet this year. Wait, how big?

It's not the size of your tablet, it's how you use it. So what would you use a 23-inch tablet for? Lenovo is planning to launch a monster slate this year, which will be more than twice the size of rivals like the iPad 2.

"We think there is potential for a 23-inch tablet," Lenovo's senior specialist in marketing William Cai tells TechRadar. "We'd have to take care of battery life and we are working to get the weight down."

We know what you're thinking: you don't have a bag that big. But obviously Lenovo's new tablet won't be designed to be carried around out in the wider world.

"It's obviously not for full mobility use," explains Cai, "but it could be moved from room to room in the house and used with a full keyboard, or as a television. Or you could lay it on a table top and use it for family games. We're hoping that we can launch it later this year."

With that in mind, Lenovo's supersized slate is almost more of a competitor for technologies like Microsoft's Surface table, rather than the blizzard of sub 11-inch tablets that are being released in 2011.

Cai gave no further details about the likely specs for Lenovo's 23-inch tablet. We're wondering how Android 3.0 Honeycomb would scale up to a screen that big, or whether Lenovo would opt to go with something like Windows 7 instead.

The family games idea is strong, although it would be interesting to see if Lenovo manages to persuade someone like EA to bring established boardgame brands such as Monopoly and Scrabble to such a device -- it has the licences to make mobile and tablet games based on them. And yes, Angry Birds on a 23-inch touchscreen sounds like a fine idea to us: the Mighty Eaglepower-up would be even more mighty.

No indication has been given about how much this tablet would cost, but we're guessing it'll be pretty pricey, making it rather a niche product. Even so, the prospect makes us wonder if there could be an HDTV-style size battle in years to come, as manufacturers compete to offer 'the world's largest tablet'.

A 46-inch tablet by 2015? Start bulking up your thighs in readiness...