Take a look at what Samsung has done with the netbook: The Sliding PC 7 is a touchscreen tablet that transforms itself into a netbook when you reveal its slide-out keyboard hidden underneath.

Introduced today at CES, the 2.18 lb beauty is running Windows () 7, connects anywhere using 3G and WiMAX (), and it’s just .78 inches thick. It’s not going to be winning any speed contests under the hood with its Intel Atom Z670 CPU, but its 32GB or 64GB solid-state drive might hasten things along a bit.

Why didn’t we think of this: A tablet PC resembling a slider cellphone with a keyboard underneath? Brilliant design. And though our friends at CrunchGear noticed that Asus beat Samsung to this idea last night, that doesn’t make us like it any less.

If you find yourself wishing that your netbook was easier to use in the dark, this tutorial will help you add an LED right into the lid and keep those keys illuminated.

The easiest way to go about solving the problem would be to stick a USB reading light in your netbook bag and plug that in when needed, but netbook owner Vikash didn’t want to have to carry something extra to replicate the built in keyboard LED he used to have on his ThinkPad. He cracked open the case of his Dell Vostro—which matches the Dell Mini 9 for those of you who want to follow along—and wired in an LED to the motherboard.

His hack is fairly advanced and includes hooking up the LED to the CTRL key via a small programmable microchip so that he can control the LED light via the hardware independently of the OS—he includes the code for the microchip. If you don’t want to get your hands that dirty you could always wire the LED right onto one of the USB ports and leech your power from there to enable an always-on LED light. Have a clever hardware hack of your own to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments.