CES 2019: Lenovo Smart Tabs forces Google and Amazon to play nice
Tablets
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This is the Lenovo Smart Tab.
And it's kind of a genius combination of features.
Look in this form it's a tablet.
An ordinary Android tablet, it has the apps you've come to expect.
You can email, you can play games.
You can do tablet stuff and take it with you as you would a tablet.
Put it into this stand, which comes with it, and it becomes an Amazon Echo Show.
Complete with the always listening Amazon assistant.
So you can give voice commands.
You can listen to music.
You can check the weather.
You can check your calendar.
And it has the visual cards that come on the echo show.
Lenovo worked with Amazon on this device.
It's basically a full on smart display when you're not using it on the go and then you get the power of a tablet for when you need it.
The only thing missing here is Amazon's communication suite.
The Echo Show let's you drop in on other shows, let's you make voice calls and video calls.
That won't be available when this launches this month but it's due out as a feature update later this winter.
So when it's in The dock here.
It can act as a central family hub for controlling the smart home, playing music, all the things a personal device like a tablet isn't normally good for, but then when you wanna bring it with you, it has the full computing power so you can surf the web and check emails.
It has the things that I sometimes miss From an ordinary smart display.
I kind of wonder why more companies haven't already tried this.
Plus the fact that it has Android built in allows you to watch YouTube videos, Netflix and do the things that aren't actually accessible on the Echo Show, then you pull up a YouTube video on this tablet.
Plug it into the dock and you'll get the full screen experience with the speakers of the base.
You can preorder these smart tabs now and they're due out later this month.
There's two different versions of them.
They have mostly the same functionality but this one's a little sleeker.
It has more memory, it has a fingerprint sensor and a couple of other nice extras for when you using it in tablet mode.
Plus, they're both pretty reasonably priced.
The P10 is $300, and the M10 is 200.
Compare that to the Echo Show which is 230, and doesn't double as a tablet.
And I actually really like the pitch of the Lenovo smart tablet.
Lenovo says it's aimed more at tablet users than smart home users, but I actually think this combination of features could work pretty well for both.
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