Speaking of home screens, Lenovo lets you choose which of the five screens is your default home screen, and gives additional custom controls over editing and rearranging screens.

In addition to its Launcher widget, Lenovo also has its own social networking hub. The Social Touch app, built for Lenovo, integrates Twitter, Facebook, mail, Gmail, and calendar access into a single timeline feed that you can view by contact, date, or time; the timeline can be further separated for work life, home life, and your commute time, no less. While one has to wonder if every tablet maker really needs to include a social networking aggregator (Samsung will have one, too), it's nice to see Lenovo trying to innovate here, even if the result currently is visually uninspiring and crashes often. Not included is Google+, at least for now.

One reason IdeaPad users may gravitate to the Social Launcher: It's an app designed for tablet use. While the inclusion of over 30 apps on the IdeaPad may seem as if bloatware from PCs is migrating to this new category, it's actually a good thing for several reasons. For one, there are enough useful inclusions here--a full version of Documents to Go, a suite of ArcSoft imaging apps, a file manager, and Netflix--that a new owner can get started without having to start searching for apps first.

Google's Android Market remains a murky, messy marsh that makes it next-to-impossible to find tablet-optimized apps. To create a better experience for users, Lenovo has its own App Shop; hosted by MobiHand, the App Shop showcases tablet apps, and apps that have been scanned for malware, two basic services that Android Market doesn't provide. Lenovo also provides an App Shop icon, as well as a widget to keep you up-to-date on the latest entries, to make it easy to find what you'd like.

One thing with Lenovo's gaggle of apps that I wasn't keen on: I found a lot of duplication, without a clear understanding of similar apps' value. For example, I get why you'd want to have Google's Music app along with Amazon MP3 (complete with access to the cloud service), mSpot ( a service for syncing up to 5GB of your music to the cloud), and even Slacker Radio. But why have another, unnamed Music app--whose purpose appears identical to Google's own app?