Lenovo's IdeaPad A10 is a low-end, Android-powered laptop with no clear target audience

Lenovo's IdeaPad A10 is a low-end, Android-powered laptop with no clear target audience ,

Lenovo IdeaPad A10

Thanks to the open nature of Android, the OS has been hacked and installed onto all manner of devices over the years, and apparently Lenovo thinks it's good enough to be the only option on a full-sized laptop. According to a few user and service manuals posted on Lenovo's site, the company plans to introduce the Android-based IdeaPad A10. The manuals were released ahead of any official announcement, but Lenovo confirmed the computer's existence to PC World. "The product has not been cancelled," a Lenovo spokesperson said in a statement that doesn't make us think the company is too enthused about the product. "It will be going out to market." If that statement sounds like damning with faint praise, there's good reason. Unlike Samsung's hybrid Windows / Android Ativ Q laptop, for example, the IdeaPad A10 is the very definition of a budget machine.

The computer features a 10-inch touch-capable screen with an "HD" resolution, a quad-core Rockchip A9 processor running at 1.6GHz, up to 32GB of storage and a max 2GB of memory. There's also a trackpad for full mouse pointer support, a low-res front-facing camera, an SD slot, and a surprisingly generous assortment of ports (including USB, micro USB,HDMI, and a headphone jack). You can also flip the screen all the way around on its hinge to watch movies, though we're not sure why this is a superior alternative to just using it like a normal laptop. The IdeaPad A10's price will surely reflect these modest specs, but we can't help wonder who exactly the target market is for this device. If you're looking for a cheap laptop and are enamored with Google, the new Chromebook might be a better bet — it's not a great computer by any stretch, but at least ChromeOS was designed to be used on a laptop.