Lenovo’s Skylight: Still Coming Soon?

In January of 2010, we covered CES pretty closely and one of the highlights was the newly designed of the Lenovo Skylight. Designed to be a ‘smart book’ by running a custom Linux OS, the Skylight still hasn’t seen the ‘light’ of day in the market, and it may not for some time longer. Speculation abounds that the Skylight might be late because it’s getting tweaked to position itself against the iPad. But Lenovo offers a different explanation for the delay. Here’s the deal…

Quick refresher for those who’ve forgotten: The Skylight is a smartbook designed to be light weight, mobile, have a full sized keyboard, and do web-based activities simply and easily. The custom Linux OS is designed with a ‘dashboard’ style; multiple windows and widgets that can be moved around, zoomed in, and zoomed out. There’s also a dock akin to Mac OS X’s dock.

DigiTimes.com has what seemed to be the source of the story. The Skylight was originally slated for and April launch, but it looks like it’s getting pushed to June. Rumor has it that Lenovo is looking to “improve the devices working performance and is mainly targeting iPad as the device’s competitor.” This comes from DigiTime’s sources in the notebook arena.

Still, Lenovo downplays the potential iPad competition. Jay McBain, director of SMB at Lenovo, says the delay is based purely on Lenovo applying some more polish to the product — rather than any potential competitive threat from iPad.

Engadget was able to have a hands-on moment with the Skylight and thought it was cool, but there was a slight feeling around the web that the custom Linux OS was still a little half-baked. This blogger noted similar things while watching some demo videos from CES attendees. The OS lacked a completely smooth polish that you’d notice with an iPad. For a device that’s geared specifically to web-based activity, smooth and quick is the name of the game. The delay could be the best thing for Lenovo.

Lenovo, who was kind enough to send this blogger a ThinkPad Edge 13 inch for review, will request to review a Skylight once they become available.

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