If the 2010 CES is any indication, 2010 is going to be the year that the tablet computer breaks out of its niche and becomes a mainstream alternative for a computing choice. While there were a lot of interesting designs present, one of the more interesting was the Lenovo Ideapad U1 Hybrid.

 

At first glance the U1 is a very smooth clamshell laptop computer running Windows 7 on a Core 2 Duo CULV processor. The 3.8 pound machine sports a 11.6 inch display, and a 128gb solid state drive provides storage. But then things get interesting. When you need a tablet, you simply pull the display out of the clamshell. The display then becomes a 1ghz ARM Snapdragon driven Linux based tablet with 16gb of flash memory.  

 

This dual configuration setup is designed to let you have maximum power when needing a full laptop and a highly efficient tablet for taking with you for less power demanding tasks. As of this writing I can't find any hard numbers as to battery life, but it does have the potential to be pretty good in the tablet configuration. Of course, it would require the user to work on both Windows and Linux, but if you could get KDE4 on the tablet it could be a very pleasant experience.

 

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