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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.'"
What We Wanted the IPad To Be
People keep talking as if Apple really missed the boat with iPad, but the truth is they only missed the boat for hard-core, tinker-happy nerds...and they've made a very specific point of missing that boat for at least the last decade. They're marketing to fanboys who want it to be trendy and 'just work', not to nerds.
So it's nice that this might be what you hoped for from the iPad. But why did you hope iPad would be what you wanted in the first place?
Lenovo will, certainly, build a more affordable and compatible/open device than Apple. Their advantage will be the price, but Apple has the advantage of their OS and well known applications.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
to demonstrate how the UI is laggy and the touch unresponsive?
Who is "we"? I'm pretty happy with what the iPad is. Also, I'm happy to pay half the cost of an IdeaPad, and get it 8 months sooner.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
catch run-on sentences in article summaries? Or perhaps stories that are over a month old?
How are people going to use this anyway? As a big e-reader? game pad? movie player? Right now it all looks cool and shiny but who is going to spend a thousand dollars - or $999 as the article reads - for this? I love cool and shiny but I don't see adding this to my life unless I had a pressing reason to do so and touch screen isn't the reason.
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.
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.
Dockable keyboard to switch from slate to laptop has been done long before, cf. the venerable Compaq TC1100, so that clearly isn't a killer feature (although I, and most long-term tablet enthusiasts, loved it and missed it when it was dropped from newer-gen Tablet PCs). Very nice, but no iPad killer, especially at the higher price.
The two OSes thing I also don't see as a killer feature. I realize the idea was probably, "Hey, an ARM CPU is needed to extend the battery life in slate mode, but anyone using a full-size laptop wants a full-size Windows 7--let's combine 'em for the best of both worlds!" Sorry Hannah fucking Montana, but you can't have the best of both worlds without getting the worst of both worlds, too, plus an even higher cost to include all that extra hardware. If I wanted a Win 7 machine, I'd want it to run the same Win 7 apps in slate mode too. If I wanted an ARM slate, I'd have made the decision to be satisfied with available apps and wouldn't want the OS changing every time I docked the keyboard. And if I really wanted the features of both, for the price (another article states "Lenovo said they're hoping to get the IdeaPad U1's price under $1000 for a May or June release") I could buy both an iPad and a full laptop, and have two fully functional devices each better suited to its purpose than one hybrid.
Sorry, there's still no mythical iPad killer. If this chimera were priced within $100 of the iPad it might be a contender, but not a sure thing. At somewhere just south of $1000 it's not even an also-ran compared with the iPad, it's a never-ran.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
Watch the videos where he's trying to do navigation. It seems like this is exactly what Apple doesn't want - lag and unreposonsiveness.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
It is always nice to see one of the PC OEMs take a break from shoving intel reference designs into ugly boxes at lowest possible cost(don't get me wrong, this is their highest virtue, is what has made computers accessible to so much of the world, and is certainly what I prefer to buy; but it really isn't very interesting to watch) and go out on a limb a bit.
That said, the concept doesn't really "click" with me. First, there is just the fact that complexity without very good reason is the enemy. If you hold price constant, increased complexity will tank your quality. If you hold quality constant, increased complexity will spike your price. The U1, compared to an ordinary netbook, has the disadvantage of two batteries(one primary, one embedded in the screen/tablet thing), two system boards(ditto, though the tablet one should be a lot smaller), and a potentially unreliable combination mechanical/electrical connector right at the hinge(when docked, the tablet unit will need to receive power, video, and data from the primary unit). This connector/hinge will have to survive numerous matings and unmatings and openings and closings without getting flaky or frustrating. If it rattles, or has to be docked two or three times to get it to go back into notebook mode, or has to be docked just right or whatever, that will be hugely annoying. I'm not saying that this will be impossible to get right, just that it will either drive up cost substantially, or not be done in a way that will still be endurable six months after purchase.
Second, and ultimately much trickier, is the question of the relationship between the main unit and the tablet unit. TFA, and other articles, suggest that Lenovo has made an attempt to have some useful interaction between the two. If you are browsing a webpage on the main when you tear the tablet off, the page will be loaded in the tablet's browser, that sort of thing. I'd assume the same would go for a few common document types. That worries me. It is exactly the sort of thing that would work perfectly in sci-fi world, where people are constantly passing wireless screens from person to person, and human computers can interact with alien spaceships, and whatnot. Real world, though, it is going to get ugly. The main unit is running Windows 7. The tablet is running on an ARM core, so it is almost certainly running CE or Linux. This means that, for a subset of all common tasks, tearing off the tablet will provide almost seamless continuity, with the right wedge of helper software and a bit of luck. Open a PDF, peel off the tablet, read happily, hurray! However, the set of document types and system activities that are equally supported between full windows and linux or WinCE is far smaller than the total set of document types and system activities. Worse, the set has ragged edges.
Consider, you open a PDF, tear off the tablet, read happily. It all works perfectly. Then, one day, it fails with some cryptic error. Whoops. That PDF had one of the newer PDF DRM schemes, and Adobe supports Reader on Windows more aggressively than whatever Lenovo has baked into the tablet. There goes your happy workflow. And, unless you are at least a little techy, and paying attention, you won't even understand why one thing worked and another didn't. Similar things can be imagined with regard to web pages, or word documents. Simply opening whatever URL was open in the foreground session of IE in the browser of the tablet should be trivial enough. Keeping cookies in sync might even be doable. However, there is surely a subset of sites that will absolutely freak out and refuse to provide anything resembling a continuous session when a user suddenly disappears from IE8 on Win7 and reappears on a completely different browser(and quite possibly IP, unless some funky network stack trickery is going on). Most likely, you'll just be kicked back to the login screen, and have to log in again using the tablet touch-keyboard, which will really break your flow. I'm sure some sites will work just fine, a
it offers what many of us wanted from the iPad
--snip--
running Windows 7 Home Premium.
I couldn't make it further than this.
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The reason I'm not paying any attention to the U1 is because apparently Lenovo doesn't want me to. Around CES there was a bunch of buzz about it, but then Lenovo completely let it drop off the radar. No pricing, no release data, no live demo units at CES. It's like they were trying to kill it. Bummer too, because it's not a bad concept. I can only assume they had some kind of massive hardware or software problems, and decided to keep it under wraps a little while longer.