Apple may have the nation’s tech fiends in a frenzy over the calculated slow drip of details and rumors circling its potential tablet announcement at the end of January, but that doesn’t mean other major tech manufacturers can’t come up with lust-worthy ideas of their own.
Take the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid. Part Linux-powered web browsing tablet, part Windows 7 running laptop, this killer combination seems to be a best-of-both-worlds scenario for those looking for a variety of computing options while on the go.
First let’s tackle the tablet portion. Said to weigh 1.6 pounds while undocked, P.C. magazine reports that this portion of the hybrid tag team runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, uses the Skylight Linux interface, and has an 11.6 inch LED lit display. It also sports an internal 16 Gig flash drive, two-fingered multi-touch interaction, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, and can last up to 8 hours on a single charge.
The “laptop” half of the device interestingly enough switches the operating system to Windows 7 when connected with the tablet, and also makes use of a separate 128 GB solid state hard drive, Intel GMA graphics chipset, 4GB of ram, and a separate Intel Core 2 Duo U41000 processor. Connectivity wise, it also adds 3USB ports (one of which is a combo eSATA port), HDMI, and a 4 in 1 media card reader
While we can’t fully speculate on the effectiveness of this device as of now, it goes without saying that its nifty transformation trick looks quite appealing. In fact, our only initial hesitations revolve around the Linux based tablet operating system which may scare dedicated Windows users.
Cost wise, its $999 starting price doesn’t seem too unreasonable given it’s versatile nature of being two devices in one. However, the real question will be how much of a premium is the detachable tablet functionality worth in your book. Outside of the die-hard gadget owners among us, our guess is not $999 worth.
