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Weird Friday Afternoon News on Lenovo UI or LePad or What Have You

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Fridays are always weird when it comes to news. Most companies don’t release anything new on Friday because, well, that’s usually a good way of getting a story buried as most folks in the media, and increasingly the blogosphere have packed up their keyboards and headed to the weekend.

But this little tidbit surfaced today on Engadget, and in some follow up blogging from Liliputing. I’m not really sure what the real story here is, or even if there is one. If you remember the Lenovo U1 Hybrid that everyone fell in love with back at CES2010, you’ll remember it was removable slate within a clamshell form factor. At the time the removable slate part was going to run Lenovo’s own OS, and the clamshell held the guts to run Windows. Thus you had essentially a Windows portable with a keyboard, or a slate that you could detach and use on the go. Well, those plans (like so many others) got shelved after the iPad was released and word was that Lenovo was going to continue with the hybrid form factor, but this time with some flavor of Android.

Suffice it to say, no one was surprised and only a small minority of geeks were keeping an eye out for any news of this.

Well, Engadget is reporting that the Chinese market will see the slate portion, or what looks to be the slate portion of the U1 later this year, and that the dock portion (still running Windows apparently) will follow in 2011. The slate portion is called the Lenovo LePad, which we’ve heard of before, so I’m still not entirely sure if these are two separate product lines or two parts of the same beast just being launched separately. In any case, we’re talking China releases here and not the US, at least for the moment.

Whatever the case, word popping out on a Friday just seems a bit odd.

5 Comments

5 Comments

  1. Joanna

    09/17/2010 at 2:05 pm

    There’s no conspiracy to the Friday release. I had the core news a few days ago, I was waiting on some answers though. Merely just the reporter doing some work :)

  2. Steve S

    09/17/2010 at 6:34 pm

    Well, I guess I’m a little surprised; apparently this is Lenovo’s best idea to stretch this drama out to the MAXIMUM possible extent without giving Customers any idea why they should wait for this product to hit the streets in the USA! *Sigh*

    With products like the ExoPC and possibly Dell’s Inspiron Duo looking a LOT more real, the IdeaPad U1… or is it just the Idea-, with the -Pad U1 coming (a lot) later?..is a lot less interesting to me than it once was.

    Maybe I’ll just go out and buy an iPad after all…

  3. ChrisRS

    09/18/2010 at 10:44 am

    NEEDS A PEN/active digitizer.

    Needs Win 7 on tablet

    Put suppl;imetat battery and hard drive on dock.

    Needs to dock in either landscape or portrait mode.

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