Lenovo Intros ARM-Based Skylight Smartbook

Smartbooks have been gaining attention on the IT market thanks to their being a sort of hybrid between smartphones and netbooks. Basically, they are designed with a netbook form factor while boasting certain smarphone capabilities such as an always-on and all-day battery life. Lenovo just finished launching its own product, named Skylight, and, naturally, plans to showcase it during the Consumer Electronics Show.

The smartbook has a 10.1-inch screen, but is much thinner than any netbook model to date. Unlike netbooks, however, it does not use x86 processors, leveraging, instead, the capabilities of the ARM architecture. The Snapdragon chipset used in the device's construction runs at 1GHz. The device itself has 20GB of flash storage, an 8GB miniSD card and 2GB of Lenovo cloud storage space. In addition, the Skylight is designed with two USB ports (one in a flip-jack form), a mini-HDMI and will be able to connect to the Internet through the built-in WiFi and the AT&T WWAN module.

The Skylight will supposedly be able to run on battery power for up to ten hours while offering the possibility for a seamless web browsing and accessing “web gadgets” such as Facebook and Gmail. The smartbook even has various multimedia features thanks to its custom OS based on Linux. Among the built-in special elements are Amazon MP3 and Roxio CinemaNow for music and movie purchasing. Coupled with the screen capable of a 1280x720 resolution, it may be that even movie viewing will be possible.