Lenovo to release 10.1″ Ice Cream Sandwich Tegra 3 tablet before 2012

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime may not be the last tablet of the year after all! Lenovo is reportedly cooking up a 10.1″ Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) device powered by NVIDIA’s new Tegra 3 chip. Apparently, Lenovo has chosen to use the faster memory option (DDR3), which would give them a bit more memory bandwidth, which can be an advantageous in situations where apps need to move a ton of data around.

Users will also find a fingerprint reader, which makes us wonder if this tablet is going to be targeted at the enterprise market as most people don’t care so much about this for a personal device. That said, the fingerprint reader is said to double as an optical Joystick, which could be great to emulate a mouse cursor (Citrix users: rejoice). The overall build quality seems pretty good, and I like that the buttons on the side are clearly protruding from the body. We’ll have to wait and see if this comes out in 2011 and if it is as good as it looks.