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.

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]