Lenovo U1 Hybrid: Part Laptop, Part Tablet, All Awesome

Lenovo, the company behind the rock-solid Thinkpad line of laptops (a personal favorite of at least one Switched staffer), has unveiled (intentionally or not) a boatload of new machines ahead of this week's CES festivities. We've seen a couple of uncharacteristically shiny Thinkpads, as well as the business class X100e netbook, but by far the most interesting thing is the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.

At first, glance, it doesn't appear all too different than other entries in the IdeaPad lineup of laptops -- it has an 11.6-inch screen, a CULV Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM for all-day battery life and enough horsepower for light photo editing, plus Windows 7 and a 128GB SSD. But when you pop the screen out of its housing, it transforms into a multi-touch tablet running Linux on a Snapdragon processor (the same type found in the new Nexus One from Google) and a 16GB SSD for storing your most essential data.

The U1 Hybrid won't be available until June, and will start at $999. We'll be sure to get some hands-on time with this unique mashup once the floor at CES opens. [From: PC Mag, via: Engadget]