First the good news: Lenovo realized that nobody wants to use a custom Linux-based user interface with virtually no third party apps on the company’s upcoming Skylight smartbook and Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid tablet/laptop device. So Lenovo is killing the Skylight OS project and will instead use Google Android on those two devices.

Now the bad news: that means Lenovo is pushing back the launch dates for both the Skylight and the IdeaPad U1.

At this point it’s not clear when either product will reach the market. But hopefully by the time they do, they’ll be able to access the tens of thousands of Google Android apps that make mobile devices more than simply portable web browsers.

Lenovo is also leaving open the possibility of using software and technologies besides Google Android. But since Lenovo’s first smartphone is Android-based, Android seems like a good fit for the Skylight and U1 Hybrid.Both tablets have the same 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor found in the Lenovo LePhone smartphone.

When I got a chance to check out the Lenovo Skylight at CES in January, it was running an early build of Lenovo’s Skylight software. The UI was reasonably attractive and it was quite snappy on the Skylight hardware. But Adobe Flash video playback was a bit choppy, and the fact that there were barely any apps made the OS a lot less attractive than Android.

You can check out my hands-on video with the Lenovo Skylight after the break. For now I guess we can consider it a requiem for a dead platform.

Update: Engadget reports that Lenovo is hoping to ship Android-based products in the 4th quarter of 2010. But it’s not quite clear at the moment if that means stripping the Skylight and U1 hybrid of the Skylight OS and slapping on Android, or completely retooling the product line.

I’m guessing it would be fairly simple to throw Android on the Skylight smartbook, since the hardware is quite similar to the Compaq Airlife 100 smartbook, which runs Android.

But the U1 Hybrid could be a different beast, since it was designed as a two-part machine. Slot the tablet into the keyboard and you have a Windows 7 tablet. Remove the tablet and it would run Skylight OS — and when you docked it again, you could pick up reading web pages where you left off. It might be a bit tougher to make that work with Android, although Mozilla is clearly working on a way to sync open browser tabs among different versions of Firefox on different platforms.

Lenovo has also started referring to the U1 as a “concept,” which doesn’t bode well for the future of this device… which was supposed to be released in June.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

7 replies on “Goodbye Skylight OS: Lenovo Skylight and U1 Hybrid to use Google Android”

  1. Of course I wonder if any one commenting uses linux and realizes the 20k plus apps that are available……hmm

  2. This is actually good news becaus eby the time Lenovo actually launches it, the market will be flooded with smartbooks and tablets and they won’t have a chance pricing it at $499.

    Chances are prices won’t be the original estimate and would drop steeply.

  3. Well, I’m actually glad they’ve done this. This could be a interesting product. Once you start asking what ‘good enough’ processing power looks like, you open up the playing field quite a bit. All the demo’s I’ve seen looked like the processor was powerful enough to do basic things like email/word processing/surfing the web, etc, and the size, weight, and battery lifetime on this product looked compelling.

    What didn’t look compelling was the OS. However good it could have been didn’t change the fact that getting developers to develop for it without a huge user base was going to be a hard sell, and so selling the units was going to be a hard sell as well.

    So kudos for removing that barrier to entry. Hopefully Google will announce their tablet/smartbook fork to Android soon so devices like these can get off the drawing boards and into consumer hands.

Comments are closed.