I’ve always had a soft spot for Lenovo products. They’re well-designed, and they are what you can call sturdy. So when Lenovo unleashed a torrent of new products at CES 2010, I eagerly checked out their new offerings. This new smartbook, called the Lenovo IdeaPad U1, is still being developed, but I’d like to get my hands on one when it comes out. You see, the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Smartbook is a clamshell laptop that can actually split in two.

So what you get is a typical netbook running Windows 7, but when you detach the screen – yes, I said detach – it suddenly turns into a tablet smartbook running Skylight Linux. Okay, say it with me: whoa. In fact, I’m going to say it again for you: WHOA.

The new Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid weighs in at 3.8 lbs when in notebook form, and only 1.6 lbs when you use it as a tablet. It comes with a detachable 11.6-inch LED-lit display that rotates into landscape and portrait mode, and supports two-fingered multi-touch no matter if you’re on Windows 7 or the Skylight environment.

Oh, did I mention that the netbook and the tablet smartbook run different hardware? The netbook itself is rocking an Intel Core 2 Duo SU4100 1.3GHz processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, an 128 GB SSD for storage and Intel GMA graphics, with Windows 7 installed. Once you detach the screen, you’ll be getting a tocuhscreen smartbook powered by a Qualcomm ARM Snapdragon processor – the same one running on the Nexus One – plus 16GB flash drive for storage, 0.5GB of RAM (DDR1) and Snapdragon integrated graphics.

To be honest, I’ve seen so many different netbooks come out at the same time running the exact same specs that I’ve lost interest in checking out a company’s new offerings. But this is definitely a game-changer.

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. It seems that Acer has come up with a laptop that has a 3-D display effect. The 3-D effect is achieved by a transparent polarizing filter overlaid on the screen, which splits images into separate streams for each eye. You would need a pair of special polarizing glasses to get the effect, and if you look at the screen straight-on, you’d get the 3-D effect. Looking at the screen at an angle may actually not show the 3-D.

According to The Times Online, the 3-D “results range from stunning to not so good.” So far, the videos that look best apparently are the ones already saved on the hard drive to begin with. You know, trailers and animations. You can download new videos, but I’m suspecting the ones especially made for 3-D will work best. That means that episode of Glee you downloaded off a torrent site won’t definitely produce the best results. Gaming on the other hand, would work better, although The Times Online reports that they can be blurry at times.

Now I won’t go all skeptical on this one and say that 3-D is just going to be a passing fad, because I really can see that this is going to be the future. We probably won’t see it in a while, but this technology is going to be adopted and 3-D will be a standard. But until then, I’d advise you guys to stay away from it until we get TV shows, movies, and games that won’t give you a headache after viewing it in 3-D.

The specs of the Acer 5738DZG are:

• 2.1GHz Intel Dual Core processor
• 4GB RAM
• 15.6 inch screen
• 1366 x 768 screen resolution
• ATI Radeon HD 4570 512 MB Graphics Card
• 500GB Hard Disk

So the world waited with bated breath this November for Michael Arrington’s much-awaited $200 internet tablet, the Crunchpad. And it never arrived. In fact, the way it just disappeared from the zeitgeist made people speculate about its premature demise.

Well Arrington came out and said that no, the CrunchPad is not dead. In fact, it’s going to be out sooner or later and it’s going to cost between $300-$400, with sponsorship (probably like Google sponsoring Firefox by being its default search engine).

Check out this video.

Okay, wait. $400 dollars for a paltry Atom-powered tablet designed to do nothing more than surf YouTube? Atom at a time when CULV netbooks are coming out? Something that doesn’t even have Windows on it? Seriously?

I’m sorry, but I think $200 is the sweet spot for something like this. I don’t think I’ll be seeing the CrunchPad take off, really. Not with its current state and price.

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The agreement, which was signed by Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other manufacturers, paves the way for the development of mobile phones that will accept the same standard charging device as early as next year.

This is really a welcome development. Any mobile phone user knows how much of a hassle it is that whenever we upgrade to a new phone, it generally means we’ll have to use a different charger, basically junking the previous charger. These unused chargers eventually find its way to the garbage dump, which helps create more waste. It’s really not an environment friendly strategy and quite wasteful of resources as well.

Under the agreement, an European Union norm or standard will be implemented and new mobile phones will now use a standard micro-USB socket as a way of ensuring utmost compatibility.

Aside from Nokia and SE, other companies that supported the move included Motorola, Apple, LG, NEC, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung and Texas Instruments.

The Surfboard, though containing an older C7-M ULV microprocessor, is also built around the VX855 unified chipset that Via also introduced last week. The VX855 has capabilities to play 1080p videos while only consuming less than 40 percent of the CPU. This HD playback capability is also one of the features of Nvidia’s Ion. Surfboard is planned to be used for netbooks with displays between 10 to 12 inches. Surfboard will also have support for Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi and 3G.

Most of the savings that Zero1 will enjoy is by removing traditional circuit switched voice calls. All of the calls on their network will go through their own VOIP application. Currently this only runs on Windows Mobile 6 phones but in the future it will also work for Blackberry, Android, Symbian, JAva and even iPhones.

The $69.95 a month plan will include VOIP calling and data, and will be done every month without a contract or credit check. An additional $10 a month, users can enjoy unlimited international calling to 40 countries.

The new flash products will begin shipping sometime during the latter part of 2009.

For many people, block abstracted NAND flash is too technical a term to really understand. Simply put, block abstracted NAND flash is flash memory that has its own optimized memory controller. This means that third party designers won’t need to design or include their own flash controller. This ultimately saves in design cost and space. The integrated controller in the NAND flash will also have its own wear levelling algorithms that allocate the blocks of memory that are written and rewritten, which will also result in savings and a better integrated design for flash based devices like MP3 players.

The new initiative is the company’s way of showing manufacturers that it is possible to build phones that will operate both Android and Windows Mobile. Among PC users virtualization is nothing new, the new thing here is that the virtualization will happen on a mobile phone, which could really lead to new ways of using and applying phones for different environments. The practical use of phone virtualization is that the middleware of a phone can be linked to the so called “brains” of a smart phone, which will make new applications for phones more possible.

Expect to see the first virtualized mobile phones in the market by next year.