There's no hiding the fact that the
first images of the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid amazed us, and now after seeing the device we can say the feeling was well-founded -- the detachable resistive multitouch display worked better than we ever expected for such an early preproduction unit. Check the mouthwatering gallery below and then head over the break for full impressions and a few videos showing off the U1's finer points.
When closed the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid looks like a regular laptop, and with a rounded aesthetic and a red shimmery paint job it's a nice looking one. Under the lid there's chiclet-style keyboard surrounded by a fun rubberized palmrest with integrated touchpad. When docked, the U1 looks and feels like any other snazzed-up 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, and the U1 delivered, as far as we could tell.
The slate itself is essentially a touchscreen version of the Skylight smartbook: it runs the same Skylight OS on a similar Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, and it seems to be pretty quick, though there's a bit of lag in between switching windows. (To be fair, we were playing with a super-early pre-production unit.) The GUI is slightly different than the Skylight -- it's built around a six-
panel interface, which can be customized with email, calendar, RSS, and social media widgets, and there's a second four-panel screen with image, music, video, and e-reader widgets that's especially finger friendly. The tablet also turns into a pretty good e-reader; we flipped to portrait it to read a preloaded PDF and the accelerometer kicked right in.
How's the touch experience? Well, the resistive 11.6-screen supports multitouch, (Lenovo wasn't saying where it came from) and though it was responsive, it was far from flawless; we had to double tap a few times to make sure our touches registered. It's also a little bit loose, although we expect that'll be cleared up by the time the U1 ships. The on-screen keyboard is big enough for entering a URL here or there, but you're not going to want to type an email on it. Unfortunately, the screen itself was pretty abysmal, with terrible horizontal and vertical viewing angles -- it basically disappeared at 45 degrees off axis. That's probably not optimal for a hand-held device, and we're hoping Lenovo sorts that out before release.
posted January 5th 2010 3:43PM
What's strange to me is that HP own's the patent to this design. I found that out the hard way when I tried to patent it a couple years ago. I was 3 years too late. Fuck you HP! ;p
You might want to take down that first video where we notice the camera pan away after he tried to finger scroll 5 times and failed. Just saying.
I really want to love this, but I have a few complaints (and concerns) right out of the gate. First of all, I'm wondering why they chose to use the Skylight UI with its Linux shell when Android seems like a more logical choice for the tablet's OS. The Snapdragon processor shouldn't have any trouble running Android and there would be a wealth of applications to tap into. And they could just as easily have added a custom shell to it, as HTC has proven with its Sense UI.
Several people have brought up the issue of separate hard drives, too, so I would hope that there's some kind of syncing capability that would let you choose directories to duplicate between the drives, the same way that Dropbox works. That way you could open/manipulate files on either the slate or the full-blown laptop and not have to worry about which you were using.
It's a shame that Microsoft abandoned the Side Show feature that was unveiled for XP back in 2002 as well. This seems like the ideal hardware to use it with, since it allowed a touchscreen tablet to connect to a standalone PC over a wireless network.
Hopefully Lenovo takes these and other concerns into account before bringing this to market, since it could be a killer device for the price: a true iPad killer with netbook appeal.