Lenovo‘s had a rocky relationship with its smartphone business having spun off the mobile division and then re-acquiring it and bringing it in-house again. Despite shaky roots, Lenovo has finally launched the Android LePhone, which offers a hybrid industrial design, unique circular keyboard, and some Lenovo customizations.

The phone was first announced at CES and Lenovo was showing that the modular screen can be detached to be used in tablet mode, or snapped back into its casing to be used as clamshell laptop-like mode with its unique keyboard design. The screen is a large AMOLED touchscreen.

With Google’s battle with China, Lenovo had to customize Android a bit for the consumer market over there–instead of Google apps, we have Baidu applications and the Lenovo app store replaces the official Android Market.

In its bid to expand and grow its presence in the mobile space, Lenovo was said to have been keenly interested in acquiring Palm lately–the well-known US PDA and smartphone maker has been suffering slow sales and was looking for either new investors, an acquisition, or some other financial plan.

(via: IntoMobile)