Everyone this year is going to try to release an iPad killer. Seriously. It's on everyone's radar and chances are, they're going to fail. But we guess it doesn't hurt to dream big, to live large, to announce fanciful hardware that might just never see the market. Enter Lenovo and their dual purpose LePad. LeWhat?

Image Source: Los Angeles Times

Via the Los Angeles Times, we discover at this year's CES, Lenovo, China's tech titan, has announced a tablet with a difference. Tote it around as just a tablet, and you're rocking Android's 2.2 Froyo OS with 10.1 inch screen, front facing camera, Flash support, 3G connectivity, and a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. That's just it's mild mannered alter-ego, though.

When you dock it in the sold separately IdeaPad U1 hardtop case, it transforms into a Windows 7 laptop running a much tougher 1.2GHz Intel processor, complete with keyboard and trackpad.

Sounds rather nifty on paper, we have to admit, and there's something of a desire for this basic premise, with dockable iPad cases featuring Bluetooth keyboards letting you turn your Apple tablet into something of a laptop. But we wonder ourselves just how big a market there is for people who want their tablet in two flavors. Sure, the iPad is devouring the netbook and laptop market and there are limitations to what you can do with it, but all sorts of compatibility issues seem to present themselves with Lenovo's scheme.

You're working on a spreadsheet in Excel on your laptop version. Not thinking, you choose to travel light to the conference, leaving your case behind. How does your Android tablet pull up those documents -- can it access the files and convert them successfully for Google Docs? Can anyone back home get into this screenless laptop to email you the spreadsheet? You can write your own scenario here, such as what happens if your laptop case takes a nosedive?

More troubling though is that if Lenovo's particular offering sounds familiar to you, that's because this is almost exactly what they announced last time around at CES. In the 2010 version of this story, the company introduced a tablet/netbook conjoined twin deal that ran Lenovo's own brand of mobile Linux, Skylight. Eventually, they scrapped Skylight in favor of Android, pushing back their public release of this for a whole year.

But wait, the story gets even less cool sounding when we get to a few more specifics. First, LePad will only be available in China the first quarter of this year where it will run you $520 for the tablet by itself. Want to upgrade this baby to a laptop model? That'll run you another $1,300. Then to make matters worse, Lenovo says the whole package won't hit the United States until Google finally releases Honeycomb -- whenever that will be.

So, sometime later this year, for almost $2,000 you can have a tablet that is sometimes a laptop running two not really compatible operating systems. Sounds like for almost the same money, you could get an iPad, a Kensington KeyFolio, a MacBook Pro, both iWork suites, and a Dropbox account to keep it all synced. And by the time this Lenovo beauty hits the states, you could be rocking your second generation iPad.

Nope, no iPad killer here.