I went to Lenovo Accelerate last week and was delighted with one of the most innovative PCs I've seen. However, when I absorbed the rest of the Lenovo ads, I realized that I was just seeing the tip of what could be a significant change in personal computers, one that could overshadow all the changes we've seen so far.
I will share my thoughts on that change and then close it with my product of the week: Lenovo's Smart Tab, another innovative Lenovo product that combines the features of an Amazon Echo with a tablet.
Foldable screen laptop
It's interesting that Lenovo is doing the old jobs "one more thing" better than Apple at the moment. I am still amazed that Tim Cook has effectively discarded practically all of the practices that made Apple the power it had in the first part of this century and, instead, has brought that company into practice.
That has certainly given companies like Lenovo an opportunity, and they've been moving forward with a series of laptop enhancements that should, when they're complete, make tomorrow's laptop so different from today's laptops. They probably have a different name.
The "one more thing" from Lenovo is a portable folding screen next that is semi-hardened to military specifications, it can be folded to something that is almost in the size class of a smartphone. It offers almost nothing in performance, while having an all-day battery life and a persistent connection (probably 5G).
Unfolded, it has a 13.3-inch OLED screen that does not have a visible seam when opened, which makes it the closest thing to a perfect electronic book I've seen.
The presenters pulled this out at the end of the Lenovo Accelerate keynote, and I doubt there was a single person in the audience who did not want the damn thing. They will have to wait, however, because it is not scheduled for 2020.
However, this was not the only announcement at the event, and I think the combination of the things that Lenovo showed will eventually result in an even more revolutionary result.
New Materials
Like the failed IBM TransNote and the impressive HP Specter Folio, Lenovo's new folding laptop will be covered in leather. Now I have two notebooks covered in leather: the HP Folio and a Microsoft Surface Book covered in leather. (It's from Toast, which also offers a wooden cover that I used, I like the skin a lot more).
Leather makes a notebook, especially one that you want to use as a tablet or electronic book, much more comfortable to wear. It's a much bigger difference than you think, and having experienced it with two products, I find it hard to want to carry a notebook that is not covered in leather.
The only exception would be a notebook covered with real open-weave carbon fiber like the one used in high-end exotic cars. I'm a big car guy (we recently moved from a house that had a three-car garage to a smaller house with a six-car garage, because I think I understood my priorities).
Other PC makers, including Lenovo, have used carbon fiber in the past, but tend to paint over it, losing the cold factor of carbon fiber. Well, Lenovo will get the carbon fiber in one of its upcoming portable Halo products, and it will not be the last to do so.
Of course, this can work for a mostly male audience, but that same audience usually also pursues high-performance notebooks, and since I'm in that group, I'm really excited.
Step security
Now one of the features that HP has made very popular is the electronic security screen. HP came out aggressively with what I still believe is one of the most important security offers that have been launched on the market. Recently it improved that offer to reduce power and show a black screen to the unauthorized observer instead of a bright white screen.
What a security screen does is to polarize the view so that only the person sitting directly in front of the screen can see what is in it. This is particularly useful if you are watching almost any current movie, and the obligatory but usually unnecessary sex scene appears without warning. However, it also prevents anyone from seeing the confidential garbage that many executives work on while flying or in public spaces.
There are people who reserve seats on airplanes specifically to see what an executive is working on. The last time I checked, these efforts were mainly to try to get an illegal jump in the stock market, but state actors who tried to steal intellectual property and large companies once again forgot the risks of intellectual property theft, this exhibition It is more problematic than most. realise.
What Lenovo showed was the first intelligent implementation of a security screen that I have seen. You see, many people who have the screen do not turn it on, because it reduces the power and brightness of the screen. What one of Lenovo's laptops does is watch the illicit viewers and then turn on the screen automatically, protecting the data and privacy, and alerting the user that someone is potentially trying to steal the IP on which they are working. This type of active defense will probably define the next wave of personal computers and even smartphones, as we adapt to the world of IP theft and blackmail financed by the state.
Laptops
Microsoft HoloLens is a portable computer, if you think about it, and the effort of Microsoft Virtual Windows displaces a large part of the device's load to the cloud, and both anticipate a very different future.
Well, Lenovo was on that page with its own ThinkReality line of AR laptops. Like Microsoft, it studied the initial users of the HoloLens solution and created an offer to address the resulting needs. You could argue that both Lenovo's initial ThinkReality offer and HoloLens II are effectively second-generation offerings.
What makes Lenovo's offer different is that the company made both the battery and the controls remote, and that it reduced the cost by bundling into a programming solution that is simple and will work with hardware different from Lenovo's. This reduces the weight of the device and increases the amount of time you can use it (because you can change the battery for four hours).
Lenovo is not as advanced as Microsoft with its wide range of solutions (Microsoft has a collaborative solution with Spatial, for example) or its gesture-based user interface (although this comes).
However, I think this will lead to a class of laptops that will allow users to define the size of the virtual screen, use the device for extended periods, increasingly use a voice interface (which will undoubtedly promote headsets with noise cancellation in the office)), and perhaps eliminate the need for smartphones, tablets and PCs as we know them. Apart from Microsoft, Lenovo is the only PC company that is solidly on this combined route.
Ending
I'm really just touching the tip of the iceberg of change, because behind this hardware is not only the coming wave of computing and personal games based on the cloud, but a coming wave of virtual AI that will be visible in these even more. Common AR headphones.
This is one of the areas in which Microsoft is probably going to jump a lot, because it's been talking about rendering Cortana for some time, and it would be great to be able to talk with a physical interpretation of its AI (I'm not sure). How will Google deal with this because talking to the Google logo is not going to be as fun as talking to Cortana, Alexa or Siri. Lenovo works with both Amazon and Microsoft, suggesting you could give your option first.
The bottom line is that I saw the future of the PC at Lenovo Accelerate, and that future is very good.
I will share my thoughts on that change and then close it with my product of the week: Lenovo's Smart Tab, another innovative Lenovo product that combines the features of an Amazon Echo with a tablet.
Foldable screen laptop
It's interesting that Lenovo is doing the old jobs "one more thing" better than Apple at the moment. I am still amazed that Tim Cook has effectively discarded practically all of the practices that made Apple the power it had in the first part of this century and, instead, has brought that company into practice.
That has certainly given companies like Lenovo an opportunity, and they've been moving forward with a series of laptop enhancements that should, when they're complete, make tomorrow's laptop so different from today's laptops. They probably have a different name.
The "one more thing" from Lenovo is a portable folding screen next that is semi-hardened to military specifications, it can be folded to something that is almost in the size class of a smartphone. It offers almost nothing in performance, while having an all-day battery life and a persistent connection (probably 5G).
Unfolded, it has a 13.3-inch OLED screen that does not have a visible seam when opened, which makes it the closest thing to a perfect electronic book I've seen.
The presenters pulled this out at the end of the Lenovo Accelerate keynote, and I doubt there was a single person in the audience who did not want the damn thing. They will have to wait, however, because it is not scheduled for 2020.
However, this was not the only announcement at the event, and I think the combination of the things that Lenovo showed will eventually result in an even more revolutionary result.
New Materials
Like the failed IBM TransNote and the impressive HP Specter Folio, Lenovo's new folding laptop will be covered in leather. Now I have two notebooks covered in leather: the HP Folio and a Microsoft Surface Book covered in leather. (It's from Toast, which also offers a wooden cover that I used, I like the skin a lot more).
Leather makes a notebook, especially one that you want to use as a tablet or electronic book, much more comfortable to wear. It's a much bigger difference than you think, and having experienced it with two products, I find it hard to want to carry a notebook that is not covered in leather.
The only exception would be a notebook covered with real open-weave carbon fiber like the one used in high-end exotic cars. I'm a big car guy (we recently moved from a house that had a three-car garage to a smaller house with a six-car garage, because I think I understood my priorities).
Other PC makers, including Lenovo, have used carbon fiber in the past, but tend to paint over it, losing the cold factor of carbon fiber. Well, Lenovo will get the carbon fiber in one of its upcoming portable Halo products, and it will not be the last to do so.
Of course, this can work for a mostly male audience, but that same audience usually also pursues high-performance notebooks, and since I'm in that group, I'm really excited.
Step security
Now one of the features that HP has made very popular is the electronic security screen. HP came out aggressively with what I still believe is one of the most important security offers that have been launched on the market. Recently it improved that offer to reduce power and show a black screen to the unauthorized observer instead of a bright white screen.
What a security screen does is to polarize the view so that only the person sitting directly in front of the screen can see what is in it. This is particularly useful if you are watching almost any current movie, and the obligatory but usually unnecessary sex scene appears without warning. However, it also prevents anyone from seeing the confidential garbage that many executives work on while flying or in public spaces.
There are people who reserve seats on airplanes specifically to see what an executive is working on. The last time I checked, these efforts were mainly to try to get an illegal jump in the stock market, but state actors who tried to steal intellectual property and large companies once again forgot the risks of intellectual property theft, this exhibition It is more problematic than most. realise.
What Lenovo showed was the first intelligent implementation of a security screen that I have seen. You see, many people who have the screen do not turn it on, because it reduces the power and brightness of the screen. What one of Lenovo's laptops does is watch the illicit viewers and then turn on the screen automatically, protecting the data and privacy, and alerting the user that someone is potentially trying to steal the IP on which they are working. This type of active defense will probably define the next wave of personal computers and even smartphones, as we adapt to the world of IP theft and blackmail financed by the state.
Laptops
Microsoft HoloLens is a portable computer, if you think about it, and the effort of Microsoft Virtual Windows displaces a large part of the device's load to the cloud, and both anticipate a very different future.
Well, Lenovo was on that page with its own ThinkReality line of AR laptops. Like Microsoft, it studied the initial users of the HoloLens solution and created an offer to address the resulting needs. You could argue that both Lenovo's initial ThinkReality offer and HoloLens II are effectively second-generation offerings.
What makes Lenovo's offer different is that the company made both the battery and the controls remote, and that it reduced the cost by bundling into a programming solution that is simple and will work with hardware different from Lenovo's. This reduces the weight of the device and increases the amount of time you can use it (because you can change the battery for four hours).
Lenovo is not as advanced as Microsoft with its wide range of solutions (Microsoft has a collaborative solution with Spatial, for example) or its gesture-based user interface (although this comes).
However, I think this will lead to a class of laptops that will allow users to define the size of the virtual screen, use the device for extended periods, increasingly use a voice interface (which will undoubtedly promote headsets with noise cancellation in the office)), and perhaps eliminate the need for smartphones, tablets and PCs as we know them. Apart from Microsoft, Lenovo is the only PC company that is solidly on this combined route.
Ending
I'm really just touching the tip of the iceberg of change, because behind this hardware is not only the coming wave of computing and personal games based on the cloud, but a coming wave of virtual AI that will be visible in these even more. Common AR headphones.
This is one of the areas in which Microsoft is probably going to jump a lot, because it's been talking about rendering Cortana for some time, and it would be great to be able to talk with a physical interpretation of its AI (I'm not sure). How will Google deal with this because talking to the Google logo is not going to be as fun as talking to Cortana, Alexa or Siri. Lenovo works with both Amazon and Microsoft, suggesting you could give your option first.
The bottom line is that I saw the future of the PC at Lenovo Accelerate, and that future is very good.
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