When Lenovo introduced the Skylight smartbook in January, the company said it would come to market in April. But Laptop Magazine is reporting today that it won’t be available in the US market until July.

At first glance, the Skylight looks like an oddly shaped netbook with a large keyboard, enormous touchpad, and super-slim design. Instead of a traditional hard drive or solid state disk, it uses a removable USB flash drive for storage and runs a custom Linux operating system called Skylight that’s designed to make the smartbook feel more like a smartphone and less like a PC.

Under the hood, the Skylight has a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with integrated GPS, WiFi, and 3G connectivity. It’s basically the same chip found in the Google Nexus One Smartphone.

AT&T will offer the Lenovo Skylight in the US and the wireless provider will offer customers a 3G data plan to go with the smartbook.

Although the US launch is being pushed back 2-3 months, Laptop Magazine says the Skylight will be available in China in May and in “other markets” in June.Hopefully the delay means that Lenovo will have time to work out some of the kinks before launch. For instance, when I first got a chance to play with the Skylight, Flash video playback was pretty awful.

You can check out my hands-on video with the Lenovo Skylight from CES after the break.

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8 replies on “Lenovo Skylight smartbook launch date pushed back to July”

  1. You guys are preternaturally obsessed with aesthetics and being able to play videos.

    1. Not everyone is bothered about videos especially HD content. I think most people just want to sufr and a bit of Word and Excel.

      The Skylight is ideal.

      Yes I agree, even Brad is obsessed with videos, HD etc. I think very few who demand portability actually use their machines to watch videos.

      Its mainly Internet, emails, word processing.

  2. Those overly rounded edges give me nighmares about the first iBooks with those transpartent candy colored plastic shells. That must have been the WORST funtioning/looking laptops ever. The iToilet-Seat was more pop culture joke then functioning computer.

  3. Any word on pricing yet? I’m afraid they’ll stick this in on or above the netbook pricing threshold, and that will just kill the device for me. It’s nice in concept, but I’m too much of a geek, and I’ve been around too long to think that having a custom OS that no one else uses, with it’s own app store that is locked down so that you can’t load programs onto the device without Lenovo’s approval is a good thing unless I can have one of these for about a hundred bucks… Otherwise I’m going to have to see what hacking their opportunities there are on this thing before even thinking about buying one… Which is sad, because on paper it looks kind of interesting.

    1. Lenovo is stupid to launch this after the iPad. Now, there is no more hype nor desire from many to own the Skylight since there is the iPad.

      But the good news is this…they must price is far below the iPad to get any volume sales.

      1. I believe they were planning to sell these subsidized with a 3g plan, but the last I heard for an unsubsidized price was $500.

        Not only does that make the price unappealing…I’m not sure who was really excited about this thing anyway. I personally love it’s slimness and battery life though. Not sure what the state of cloud computing is now, Microsoft Office online would make smartbooks much more viable.

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