Lenovo unveils first Ice Cream Sandwich TV
Lenovo is referring to the user interface as the Sandwich UI—letting you switch among video on demand, Internet apps and of course regular TV.
Google's Android operating system version 4.0, better known by as "Ice Cream Sandwich", has been slow to arrive on smartphones and tablets (it recently debuted in the U.S. on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone). But Chinese tech company Lenovo used CES to introduce the first smart television with Android 4.0, a 55-inch 3-D (240Hz refresh rate) LED model called the K91. It will be available in April — in China.
Lenovo is referring to the user interface as the Sandwich UI—letting you switch among video on demand, Internet apps and of course regular TV.
TV apps are customizable by Android developers. More than 100 apps are preloaded and you'll be able to tap into the Android Market, a Lenovo store and Lenovo cloud services—you can share music, videos, pictures and so on from tablets and phones and computers.
The TV has a Qualcomm Snapdragon dual core processor, 1 gig of RAM, a hard drive with 8 gigs of storage, plus a removable 2GB SD card.
There's also a built-in 5 megapixel camera for video chats, or, as is the case Ice Cream Sandwich phones, to "unlock" the television.
(Hopefully the facial recognition feature will work better than it does on phones.) The remote control features a touchpad, 5-way keys and a motion sensor. It can also respond, Lenovo says, to voice commands.
Lenovo is producing a 42-inch model as well, but the company hasn't disclosed any of its TV plans for the U.S. market or spilled the beans on pricing. Lenovo did tell me that despite the fact that the K91 employs Android, it is not a "Google TV".