Lenovo ThinkPad 8 now official: brings Intel Bay Trail powered full-on Windows 8.1 with 8-hour battery life

The combination of Intel’s newest Atom mobile microarchitecture combined with a full-on Windows 8.1 experience on a tablet with good battery life is definitely the most impressive feat of the ThinkPad 8. You should be able to configure the tablet, but the version Lenovo advertizes comes with the most powerful 2.4GHz Intel Z3770 quad-core chip. Sadly, Intel has gone the way of Qualcomm and others advertizing max turbo clock frequencies rather than average speeds, so that 2.4GHz number is not actually your average. The average speed after the inevitable thermal throttling will likely be around 1.46GHz. Bay Trail comes with Intel’s own HD Graphics solution with support for OpenGL 3.2 and DX11. The ThinkPad 8 also features 2GB of LPDDR3 1067MHz dual-channel RAM.
The 8.3-inch screen is very sharp featuring an impressive Nexus 7-like 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution. It is a compact solution, but still not too small to be a limiting factor for Windows 8.1. There are no on-screen buttons, just a single Windows key below the screen.
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The Lenovo ThinkPad 8 will arrive in late January and will be configurable, but you can expect topseller model prices to start at $429.