Second Generation Lenovo LePad Coming This Fall

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Lenovo has offered up some interesting products in the past. They took over the ThinkPad market, and if you haven’t seen a Lenovo LePhone at some point, you really should (I’ve tried them. It’s like the Chinese iPhone, but with Android.). But a strange new development has already hit–the second generation LePad will be hitting stores this September or possibly October, according to reports out of Lenovo.

Yes, I know–the original LePad has been on store shelves in China for all of about two weeks now–but the report out of the opening banquet at the 2011 Chinese IT Leadership Summit, which took place just last night, gave us word directly out of Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing’s mouth.

The early word, and this from the CEO of Lenovo himself, said that the next LePad will be, much like the next iPad was back before it was the current iPad, lighter and thinner than its original iteration, and they’re planning to launch it in either September or October.

This is about four (five if you stretch it to October) months after what is projected to be the global launch for the Lenovo LePad, which seems on the surface like a bad idea. Why wheel out the newest version of a product less than four months ahead of the old one’s wide release? How many people would you lose in sales who just look at it, sigh, and say “the next one comes out in a couple months anyway–I’ll just wait for that”.

An explanation came when the CEO spoke further about the development process–turns out they were developing the second LePad in conjunction with the first, on parallel circuits. The sequel just took a little longer to get to product than the original did! Of course, there’s nothing saying that they’ll meet their target launch date. There’s nothing saying it won’t get pushed back to sometime next year. We don’t even have a stats list yet, or early pictures, or even price, but we do know the launch date, and that makes it something of a shaky proposition.

Will we see the LePad 2–if that’s even what it’s called–in stores mere months after the LePad finally hits us? That’s strictly supposition, but from what the CEO said, it’s more likely than you might think.