With a 10.1-inch, high-resolution screen that boasts true 1080p HD, the IdeaPad certainly has the visual chops to make it in what is expected to be a heated competition against Samsung, Toshiba and other PC makers in the fight to counter Apple’s wildly successful iPad.

What may ultimately separate the IdeaPad Slate, for better or for worse, from its closest rivals is its all-in embrace of a truly native Windows 7 OS, rather than, say, Honeycomb, the eagerly awaited Android rev expected to power tablets ranging from Toshiba to Motorola.

Lenovo has also customized the user interface so that apps may be separated into distinct “work” and “play” tabbed areas from the homescreen, so those devotees who have embraced Windows’ latest desktop OS and haven’t yet jumped aboard the Android express may ultimately find themselves gravitating toward this sleek Lenovo offering.

And they’re getting a pretty decent tablet for their buck, too. The first-gen IdeaPad Slate will boast a 32-GB solid-state drive (expandable through a side-memory card slot), along with 2 GB of RAM and built-in 3G connectivity. (No carriers have been locked down as of yet.)

Running this machine, which boasted a decent response time that would beat out Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, is Intel’s Oak Trail chipset, optimized specifically for tablet PCs. Lenovo reps estimate six hours of web browsing on a single charge — still far less than the iPad — and between four and five hours for video playback.

No retail price has been announced, but you can wager the IdeaPad Slate will run somewhere around $500, and it should hit stores sometime in late spring.

Indeed, industry experts are expecting the tablet floodgates to open come that timeframe, when many of the tablets unveiled here at CES should start to hit the marketplace.

Other early entries include Motion Computing’s rugged CL900, which is geared toward business users with its durable exterior shell, 2.1-pound weight and sub-$1,000 price point, as well as Asus’ mammoth Eee Slate EP121, complete with 12.1-inch screen, 64-gig solid-state drive, and Intel Core i5 CPU.

Yes, CES has barely begun, but the Year of the Tablet is officially in full swing.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Authors: Erik Malinowski

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