Kraus Uses the Lenovo IdeaTab S6000-F

The Lenovo IdeaTab S6000-F is a 10” tablet with quite a lot of features for a small price.

    When I was researching a tablet to purchase, I had some requirements. I wanted an Android, 10” screen, expandable SD memory slot, micro-usb slot, good battery life, and of course, price. It also had to have a decent amount of on board memory and of course a decent processor and decent screen resolution. The options I cared least about was cell data connection, GPS, the number of cameras and their resolutions, or weight. The Lenovo IdeaTab S6000-F fit all my conditions with the bonus of being very reasonably priced. In fact, the more I research other, much more expensive, 10” tablets I have become increasingly happy with my purchase. With the exception of the Galaxy Tab, all other 10” tablets fall short in at least one of my primary requirements.

   This is not a blog about specs, but about usability. Specs can be researched anywhere. Just be warned that, there are several version of the S6000 and each has slightly different features. For instance, only the one with 3G has GPS and the S6000-L doesn't have a micro-HDMI port. The S6000-F that I have is advertised as having a radio, but it's not activated. Some people have figured out how to activate it though. So far it has had no problem running any games or apps I throw at it. I can play any 3D or physics games with no issues. Because of the not so good back camera augmented reality apps and other camera apps like Google Goggles, and bar code scanners aren't so fantastic and require some very specific lighting and angles to work well. The screen resolution is great for everything I have done with it and the visibility angles are fantastic. The battery life is epic! It seemed that the claim of a nine hour battery life was a bit optimistic. The second day I had it I used it from a totally full charge all the way down till it was totally drained. The total time was a bit over 12 hours. Right now that I have a lot more widgets and apps with push notifications and constant updates, I get about eight to nine hours of battery.

     If you want to hook your IdeaTab S6000 to your Linux box it can be a bit fiddly. I found a great guide for setting up your Linux box as a development environment for your Lenovo tablet here; http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=921169.

    If you are using Windows then you will need LeTools from Lenovo which can be found here; http://download.lenovo.com/slates/k1/letools/letools/.

    On a scale of “You get more than you pay for” to “Don't waste your money” it gets a solid “You get what you pay for”. While the Lenovo IdeaTab S6000 isn't as feature rich as much more expensive 10” tablets, it is definitely worth taking a look at.