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IdeaPad U1, What We Wanted the iPad To Be

Xanator writes "With the announcement of the iPad, the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid appears to have gone unnoticed, but maybe we ought to pay it more attention. It's a netbook with a removable screen that turns it into a tablet (switching OS from Windows 7 to a tablet OS within 3 seconds), and it appears to offer what many of us wanted from the iPad. Quoting Engadget: 'When docked, the U1 looks and feels like any other laptop, with an Intel CULV processor and a 128GB SSD running Windows 7 Home Premium. You actually wouldn't know there's a slate hiding in there — until you pull it out and watch it switch to Lenovo's Skylight UI, a process that was smooth and quick for us. Lenovo says the goal is for the full switch to occur in under 3 seconds.'"

2 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. I don't want a tablet that's a computer by bwalling · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't want all the bother of a computer. I already have that. For a tablet/slate, I just want to run a few apps/games and get online. I want it to be easy. I don't really want to mess with the file system. I don't want a browser that's vulnerable to malware. I don't want to have to mess with drivers. I don't want to have to manually drag and drop or copy my music or pictures from my computer to my tablet (or worse, dick around with file sharing over a network). I just want the damn thing to do apps, games and Internet without any fuss. I bet the iPad will do that and do it well. I just wish some of the competitors actually understood that concept.

  2. For the same price: iPad + MacBook Pro + 2 iPods by gig · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lenovo was talking $1999 for this, and there is no availability date.

    For the same price you can get an iPad, a MacBook Pro, an iPod touch, and an iPod shuffle. Then you have a desktop OS, a tablet OS, a pocket tablet OS, and a microscopic music player. You have 3 screens. All 4 items work simultaneously. The Mac is carved out of a block of aluminum and feels like it. All you bookmarks and contacts and music and photos sync between all of the devices automatically. The 3 devices with browsers all run HTML5 apps, and the Mac also runs BSD, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, as well as Mac apps. A single iPhone app purchase puts the app on both tablets. A $50 Mac app runs other Intel operating systems in a window at full speed and with 3D graphics.

    Just because you are a nerd that doesn't mean you don't have actual work to do. The action is in the software, not some convertible geegaws.