Lenovo announced just before the start of CES that it would show off the Hybrid X1 laptop and Pocket-lint has just finished playing with the new laptop that has a spilt personality.

On the surface, the Hybrid X1 looks like any ordinary Windows PC, albeit one that is thinner than the company's usual ThinkPad range. 

The specs look normal too. You'll get either an Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 chip along with a 13.1-inch Gorilla Glass display. But it's the Hybrid part of the new X1 that intrigues the most.

You see, it's not just an Intel chip packed inside, but a Qualcomm dual-core one too. The idea being that you can fire up a Linux OS using this for easy access web browsing, video watching, picture viewing, email checking and music listening.

In action and the switch happens very quickly as Windows merely goes into sleep mode rather than shutting down completely.

The benefit here of course is that you gain massively on the battery life. So much so, claim Lenovo, that you'll get double the life switching to the Qualcomm chip because you aren't having to worry about running Windows when you are doing something your computer finds mundane - like watching a movie on the plane.

When finished, you simply pressed a button and you switch back to Windows within seconds.

On the build side of things the X1 Hybrid is as good as you'll expect.

Ultimately this looks to be a very clever idea, and while the idea isn't new - HP has had a feature called QuickPlay for some time - the approach of using a phone/tablet chip to do this is, and for us that makes this a very interesting proposition, especially if it means that you'll still have enough battery to do your work and have some fun on long haul flights. But then - how quickly did people lose interest in dual boot netbooks?