Lenovo's U1 is a netbook with removable tablet

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Everyone’s all excited about that Freescale gizmo, but it looks like it may have competition. The Lenovo U1 has a similar convertible design, though with a slightly more rounded look. It’s also different in function: when docked, it runs Windows 7 on the dock’s low-power Intel processor, but once detached it uses an ARM CPU to run a lightweight Linux distro. Not sure how it’s going to handle the segue if you’ve got work in progress and need to dock it, but I’m sure Lenovo has that handled.

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Here are the specs, broken down into tablet and dock portions:

Tablet:

  • 1.6 pounds
  • 1GHz Snapdragon processor
  • 512MB DDR1 RAM
  • 16GB SSD

Dock:

  • 3.8 pounds (with tablet attached)
  • Intel Core2 Duo U4100 processor
  • 4GB DDR3 RAM (max)
  • 128GB SSD

One other major difference: the U1 starts at a thousand dollars. I get the feeling Freescale might be the more attractive proposition to most people. We’ll see ’em both at CES, though, so we’ll let you know.

[via PC Magazine]