I don’t know if it’s possible for Lenovo to go a full Consumer Electronics Show without announcing a laptop or two that are just plain weird. At CES 2024, that’s not changing in the slightest–in fact, the company has three different laptops that look and act a little funky next to more traditional clamshells.
There’s the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid that can go from a Windows laptop to an Android tablet, the concept ThinkBook 13x Gen 4 SPE that leverages E Ink to show off your personal style, and the Yoga Pro 9i which looks conventional but boasts some serious AI chops. Lenovo is also debuting a bunch of regular laptops as well, but they’re certainly not as fun as these ones.
The wackiest laptop in Lenovo’s CES lineup is by far the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid. On the outside, it looks like a normal laptop, just with a cylinder hinge and a bit of extra weight. But yank the screen off the keyboard base and you’ll watch the display transition from Windows 11 to Android 13. Lenovo has stitched together two separate devices–a Windows laptop built into the keyboard base and an Android tablet in the screen–to create one of the most true-to-form 2-in-1 devices I’ve ever seen.
There’s no dual-booting happening here, and Lenovo said it only had to make a few software tweaks to make it work. In a demo with the laptop, I watched the laptop go from Windows to Android in about 6-8 seconds, which is surprisingly fast.
The pins at the bottom of the laptop’s display are what trigger the transition from Windows to Android. When you dock it, the system knows to show the Windows half. When undocked, it transitions to Android. This is literally two separate systems stitched together through data pins. It is wild.
You can use the systems at the same time too, at least to an extent. Through an app called Hybrid Stream, you can fire up the Android experience and use the keyboard and mouse for controlling the interface and typing. Remove the tablet from the base, connect the base to an external monitor, and you’ve got a full-fledged Windows PC running alongside your Android tablet.
For specs, you get an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor on the Windows half with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, along with an Intel Arc GPU and a 75Wh battery. For the Android portion, there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 38Wh battery. Flip it around and you’ll even find cameras. Both halves of the ThinkBook also come with Wi-Fi 6E and USB-C ports. The OLED display measures in at 14 inches and has a 2.8K resolution, as well as pen input.
The speaker setup is also a little wacky. You’ve got four speakers around the tablet portion and twin Harman Kardon speakers on the laptop base. They all work in conjunction for a boosted surround sound experience, even when you detach the tablet. In a demo, the speakers sounded pretty good, much better than other members of the ThinkBook family.
I don’t know if this thing is gonna be successful, but it’s pretty damn cool. It’ll retail for $1,999 and launch in the second quarter of this year.
Then there’s the ThinkBook 13x Gen 4 SPE, a concept laptop with one neat trick: it has an E-Ink screen strapped to its lid to help you express your personality. Using E ink Prism technology, the screen supports up to 1,000 different images, patterns, and other styles to give your laptop a little pizzazz. It’s in full color, too, so you can show off just about whatever you want.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get specs or other details on this ThinkBook, and it’s unclear if the technology will ever reach a product that ships. Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time Lenovo strapped an E-Ink screen to the back of the laptop.
During my meeting with Lenovo, I was introduced to the Yoga Pro 9i through its specs and design. It’s a nice-looking machine, mind you, and it’s pretty powerful. You get a 16-inch 3.2K 165Hz IPS display with up to 1,200 nits of brightness, up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 H processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics, 64GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, gobs of ports (we’re talking Thunderbolt 4, USB-A, HDMI, SD card, and more), a six-speaker system, and an 84Wh battery.
It’s a very impressive system, and it seems like a great option for creators. But in their press release, they revealed another portion of the system: a focus on generative AI.
The AI lives in an app called Yoga Creator Zone, which Lenovo says is a generative AI app that can act as an “imagination sparkplug.” In layman’s terms, that translates to an AI image generator that can take text or your sketches and generate images based on your query. It’s a feature to make the latest Yoga laptops more appealing to creators who might need inspiration once in a while.
If you have a particular art style and would like that to be reflected in the images generated by Yoga Creator Zone, you’ll have to get a Yoga Pro with a dedicated GPU. That will enable Image Training, which lets you train an on-device AI model on what style you prefer so that it’s reflected in each image you generate. I can see that coming in handy for anyone who likes consistency in their art projects.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to dig into it too much during my time with Lenovo. Not only were they light on additional information, but the demo units they had on hand weren’t equipped with Yoga Creator Zone. The app is expected to ship when the Yoga Pro 9i–and the less-powerful Yoga Pro 7–go on sale in April. The Pro 9i starts at $1,699.99.
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