It wouldn’t be CES if Lenovo didn’t have a bevy of new laptops to announce, but I can’t say we saw the company’s new ThinkBook Plus coming. On one level, it’s pretty prosaic — it’s available with a 13.3-inch matte, full HD IPS display, one USB-C Gen 2 port, a pair of full-size USBs and an HDMI-out. And since this isn’t a one-size-fits-all sort of machine, you can configure it with up to a 10th-gen Intel Core i7 processor, either 8GB or 16GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of onboard storage.(Sorry folks, no discrete graphics here.)
What makes the ThinkBook so strange, though, is the 10.8-inch, touch-sensitive E-Ink display Lenovo wedged into the back of the screen.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Lenovo dabble in these displays — it used an E-Ink panel in place of a traditional keyboard for its Yoga Book C930 not too long ago. Its approach this time is a little less ambitious, but Lenovo hopes this oddball addition will be enough to make its customers just a little more productive before even opening up their computers. Need to see what’s next on your daily agenda? Or to quickly triage those emails that just landed in your inbox? You can do both from that external screen, though it’s worth noting you can’t actually edit those calendar appointments or respond to emails there.
As it stands, tapping the Kindle icon on that external screen simply launches the standard Windows Kindle app, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to tweak things so that a tap on the side of a page flips the book to the next one. It’s fine if all you plan to do is click through a couple of pages, but I couldn’t imagine getting through a whole book like this. And since this is by Lenovo’s admission a computer meant for business customers, it’s even harder to imagine that its target audience would even bother.
If some of these features sound a little… shall we say, half-baked, well, you’re not wrong. For what it’s worth, Lenovo doesn’t really imagine people shelling out north of a thousand dollars for a laptop because of this additional display. Instead, it’s more of a bonus — if people figure out ways to improve their workflows because of it, great! If not, well, they still have a perfectly fine PC with a reasonable price tag.
Beyond that, though, the ThinkBook Plus is just one of those delightfully weird machines that so often appear at CES. At best, it’s an example of blue-sky thinking that could lead Lenovo to rethink what its computers should be capable of. And at worst? Well, it’ll be a pretty good conversation starter at that upcoming chamber of commerce meeting.
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Author: Chris Velazco
Source: Engadget
