From the outside, the ThinkPad Tablet looks as if it would fit right in with Lenovo's classic matte black case designs. The back is covered with a soft, slightly rubberized surface, the front bezel finished off with a piano-black plastic.

The ThinkPad Tablet has a starkly different design as compared with its sibling, the IdeaPad. It has four physical buttons on the front, situated along the bottom beneath the screen, and optimized for use in portrait orientation. Physical buttons like these are unusual inclusions for an Android 3.1 Honeycomb tablet such as this, since Android has all the buttons you need inside its interface.

However, Lenovo chose to make certain functions not only physical buttons, but ones that are up front and easy-access, too: rotation lock, Web browser, back, and home. The buttons are a curious inclusion; I only found the home and back buttons of occasional convenience, and even then I didn't like how my fingers had to work to depress the buttons, which click inward, even though the buttons themselves run to the outer edge of the tablet. The inward-click at least mitigates accidentally invoking a button click, and physical buttons are preferable to soft-touch capacitive buttons that are too-easy to accidentally tap, but I would have preferred the cleaner look of a button-free design.

Buttons aren't the only thing that make this boxy model stand out. It's also one of the thickest tablets we've seen, at a solid 0.57-inch thick. And it measures 10.3-inches long and 7.2-inches wide, making it one of the larger models we've seen overall. By comparison, the svelte Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 measures 10.1 by 6.9 by 0.34 inches. Not surprisingly, the larger dimensions contribute to ThinkPad's heavier weight, 1.64 pounds to Galaxy Tab's 1.24 pounds. The weight difference is especially obvious when holding the tablet in one hand, and you try to use it for anything longer than a minute or two at a time.