Journalists love a good tech prototype. These exciting experiments break up the monotony of covering the same incremental refreshes day-in and day-out.They also come with a downside: As attention grabbing as they are, there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever actually come to market.
That’s why covering them can be a bit tricky, as it can be difficult to decide how much attention to give a product consumers might never actually see. Luckily, Lenovo actually made good on one of its earlier promises at CES this year, showing off a rollable laptop that’s set to launch sometime in 2025. Now, the company has three additional concepts it’s showing off for Mobile World Congress, all of them arguably as cool.
A foldable spin on that CES’ rollable screen
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
First, there’s the ThinkBook Flip AI PC, which you can think of as a more affordable take on that rolling laptop from CES. Rather than having some of the screen hidden inside the laptop and unfurling like a scroll, this laptop’s screen folds over the top-half of the device, stretching across both the sides of the lid. Using your hands, you can unfold it to get an especially tall vertical display, or, alternately, mirror the front of your screen to the backside for presentations. Or, you could use the laptop in a sort of tablet mode while it’s closed. It’s similar to existing devices like the Yoga Book 9i, sure, but unlike on those, the screen is continuous and the keyboard is built into the device.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
There are upsides and downsides to this approach. Because there’s no need to house a rolling mechanism, the Flip AI PC is actually able to get a little taller than a rollable laptop, but at the same time, it’s also a bit more top heavy, so you can’t use the fully extended screen at a steep angle without extra support.
Snap-on laptop monitors
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Also in the realm of extended laptop displays are the Magic Bay Dual Display and 2nd Display laptop accessories. Technically, this isn’t the first time Lenovo’s shown off concepts for Magic Bay, existing technology that allows certain accessories to snap onto pogo pins on the back of some ThinkBook laptops. Those have even included secondary displays before, but this year’s ideas definitely are a bit more involved.
Starting smaller, the Magic Bay 2nd Display is an 8-inch vertical screen that complements a laptop with a (non-touch) tablet-like companion. It’s similar to the 10-inch horizontal panel that sits above your laptop screen that Lenovo showed off at last year’s CES, and coincidentally recalls my husband’s own desktop setup. As handy as it seems—it’s even on a hinge for a customizable angle— it’s nonetheless overshadowed by Lenovo’s other Magic Bay display concept.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
The Magic Bay Dual Display turns your laptop into a three-monitor workstation, with additional 13.3-inch screens on either side of your device, complete with a 120Hz refresh rate across both. At 2.6 pounds, it’s rather heavy, so it comes with a built-in kickstand. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an idea like this, but when I saw this in person, I was impressed by how much more intuitive the connection process seems compared to current third-party alternatives.
A solar-powered laptop
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Outside of the realm of screens, there’s also an experimental solar-powered laptop that can charge off sunlight, called the Yoga Solar PC. It works through a solar cell built into the back of the laptop’s lid, which Lenovo says has “an over 24% solar energy conversion rate” and can charge up enough to play one hour of video within about 20 minutes of direct sunlight. I didn’t get to see it in action, seeing as I was in a dark room while Lenovo was showing it off, but I can say the solar technology doesn’t seem like it’s impacting the form factor too much. It was plenty thin looking to my naked eye, and the company says it’s 0.6-inches thin and 2.69 pounds. If that’s still too big for you, Lenovo did also show off the Solar Power Kit for Yoga concept, which is a standard battery bank that connects to a detachable USB-C solar panel (I didn’t see this one in person).
Credit: Lenovo
Evolutions on earlier concepts
Credit: Lenovo
While I got to see (most of) the above concepts in person, the company also has a few iterative changes on earlier ideas, and showed that it’s prototyping out its own version of competing devices. These include a glasses-less 3D ThinkBook, similar to devices that Asus and Acer already have on the market, as well as an AI-powered robotic companion named Tiko that would attach to laptops via Magic Bay.
For more functionality, there’s also a Tiko Pro in the works, a small horizontal Magic Bay display that combines the advantages of the 2nd Display with AI-powered widgets. Again, we’ve seen versions of these either from competitors or at previous Lenovo concept announcements, but they’re still worth keeping an eye on.
A bit more exciting is the Hybrid Dimensional 24-Inch Curved Monitor, which can supposedly display 3D visuals while simultaneously showing 2D assets without any loss in resolution, although this needs to be seen with your own eye to really be judged, and I have yet to get hands-on time with it.
Bringing AI to non-AI PCs
Credit: Lenovo
Finally, there are tools to bring AI to non-AI PCs. Lenovo says it’s experimenting with two dedicated neural processing units, or NPUs, that can connect to existing PCs either through a USB stick or a monitor. Working like an external graphics card, the Lenovo AI Stick contains a 32TOPS NPU that can plug into a computer without an NPU over Thunderbolt to allow it to run LLMs and AI graphics tools locally. It can work off just the laptop’s own power, but Lenovo says you can also plug it into a wall at the same time for increased performance.
Meanwhile, the AI Display with NPU Inside does much the same thing, but rather than including the NPU in a hub-like structure, builds it right into your monitor. This comes with the added benefit of allowing the screen to physically rotate, elevate and tilt to follow your movements, but like most monitors, it’s much bulkier and does need to be plugged into a wall at all times. Lenovo also says it’s working on an “AI Ring” that would provide gesture-based control while in spatial computing apps, although the company didn’t go into much detail beyond that.
And that’s it on Lenovo’s MWC concepts. It’s a pretty wide array. Again, none of these are guaranteed to come to market, but that does mean they get to be a bit wackier than the typical product announcement. Personally, I’d love to get my hands on the Magic Bay Dual Display, and I could see the AI Stick being useful to developers. In the meantime, the company also announced a number of chip upgrades for its existing ThinkPad, ThinkBook, IdeaPad, and Yoga laptops that will start hitting the market with the new Yoga 7 2-in-1 and IdeaPad Slim 3x this month.
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