Event Coverage

CES 2010: Show Floor Coverage (Part 4)

By Vijay Anand - 10 Jan 2010

Lenovo's Booth

Lenovo's Booth

Lenovo touts their new A300 all-in-one system as the thinnest in the industry. The bulk of the system's components are integrated into the base versus behind the LCD screen. It sports a 21.5-inch Full HD panel (resting on a swivel arm), Bluetooth based keyboard and mouse, 802.11n WiFi integrated, and is powered by a mobile Core 2 Duo platform.

Plenty of I/O ports are integrated in its base like dual HDMI ports, TV tuner antenna input, multiple USB ports, RJ45 LAN port, FireWire, flash card reader and analog audio input/outputs.

Lenovo's famous S10 series of netbooks get an upgrade with the new S10-3. Though still using a 10.1-inch screen, the exterior gets a more distinct look and feel while the interior sports the newer Pine Trail platform (going up to an N470 Atom processor), up to 320GB of hard drive storage, stereo speakers with Dolby Headphone audio output and an improved Quick Start 2.0 interface that boots up a customized Linux partition to get on to the web in seconds from powering up the system. Other neat new features are Maplife (location based mapping software), VeriFace (face recognition software) and an Active Protection Suite (basically an accelerometer based design to protect the hard drive from sudden bumps or falls by parking the read/write heads at moment's notice upon such freefall incidents).

This is the tablet brother of the S10-3, the S10-3t. It is identical in hardware to the S10-3, but has a pressure based touch screen that can swivel 180 degrees in any direction and fold over to form a true tablet PC.

This is the Skylight smartbook from Lenovo (also otherwise commonly categorized as a netbook). The Skylight is designed as a pure net-centric lifestyle computing platform with a customized web-optimized Linux operating system and widgets for easy access to certain online apps or content like Gmail, YouTube, Facebook and more. The hardware of the system consists of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor and platform, a 3G modem, 20GB of flash and 2GB of 'cloud' storage. If you need to draw a parallel comparison, the Skylight smartbook is competing in the same space as the NVIDIA Tegra based netbooks that are also meant for Telcos to bundle the hardware along with their data plans.

Here's a side view of the Skylight smartbook. Thin and light at under 1.3kg. With a processor that was originally used on smartphones, the low power ARM-based chip is expected to give the Skylight a longer battery life than standard netbooks - up to 10 hours of active battery life as Lenovo cites. Estimated price is US$499 when available in April.

And this is the much talked about IdeaPad U1 - a truly hybrid notebook with a detachable screen that instantly switches between a full function notebook mode and that of a 3G enabled multi-touch tablet device. The detachable 11.6-inch screen has its own power and processing platform that's used on the Skylight notebook. Even the operating system is identical, using the Skylight's operating system. The 'dock' portion that gives the screen more power in battery and processing as well as a proper keyboard has a Core 2 Duo SU series processor, up to 4GB of memory, card-reader, eSATA and other commonly expected outputs. A complex circuitry layer ensures data usage on either mode is seamlessly and instantly transferred over to the netbook or the tablet mode for continuous and seamless computing. Prices start at US$999 and is available only from June 2010.

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