It has been almost one whole year since we last heard of the Lenovo U1 and it’s only now that a real “hands-on” is being provided? Yes, I was able to fondle the alpha-level device at CES 2010, but it wasn’t exactly market ready.

Well, it turns out that Lenovo has not yet abandoned this contraption just yet and some real “first impressions” are being posted on the Internet. For starters, the standalone tablet portion is being dubbed LePad and the docking part is being called the U1 dock. Combined, you get the Lenovo U1 Hybrid.

The interesting thing is that a lot has changed since we saw this product at CES last year. The “new” 10.1-inch LePad gets a capacitive display, Google Android 2.2 (instead of the Linux-based Skylight), and the LePhone skin for colorful navigation. The guess is that Snapdragon has also been ditched in favor of NVIDIA Tegra 2, possibly as a pre-maneuver for Honeycomb support, but we can’t say for sure. And yes, it has dual cameras.

As far as the Lenovo U1 Hybrid dock is concerned, it seems to function in much the same way as we saw before, offering a full chiclet keyboard, a beefed up processor, and Windows 7. The unit available for the “hands on” was non-functional, though.

[Engadget]

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"The enTourage eDGe is the world’s first dualbook, combining the functions of an e-reader, netbook, notepad, and audio/video recorder and player in one. It’s a comprehensive device that lets you read e-books, surf the Internet, take digital notes, send emails and instant messages, watch movies and listen to music anywhere, at any time. This is nothing you've ever seen before!" Source: entourageedge.com

The enTourage eDGe is the world’s first e-reader and netbook hybrid device to hit the market, and it begins shipping next week. With dual displays, the eDGe has a 9.7-inch E-Ink screen on the left, and a 10.1-inch touchscreen LCD with 1024 x 600 resolution on the right.

The specifications are quite abundant, much to offer in an eReader, but the real eye catcher is that it runs on the Google Android OS. This will free up system and allow it to receive amazing new applications currently being developed around the world for Android devices. The three pounder is quite thick looking in the photos, but on the enTourage specifications page it’s actually just 1-inch closed. Three pounds seems pretty heavy considering Apple’s iPad is half that, but of course with only one display.

Battery Life is said to be 16+ hours utilizing the e-reader screen and up to 6 hours running the LCD screen. That’s quite good and is in line with other devices. Connectivity comes in WiFi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth flavours, no wireless 3G.

“Pre-orders received by January 12 will start shipping at the end of this week. New orders will ship in March,” E-Reader.info reports in an interview with Doug Atkinson, Entourage’s VP of Marketing and Business Development.

The company plans to have their own e-book store and isn’t afraid of going up against Amazon or Apple’s iBook store. “Having our own e-bookstore allows us to offer books and documents based on our customer demand,” said Atkinson in the interview. They will also provide access to over 1,000,000 free public domain titles from Google Books.

In a video demo by the company they show how you can drag a grayscale image from the E-Ink screen and view it in full color on the LCD one, or attach a video clip on one side to a passage from an e-book the other.

At $499 it sounds like a great buy, and you get to use the Android OS.

enTourage eDGe Dualbook Tablet Image Gallery

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