After launching the world’s first foldable laptop ready for production, Lenovo is back at it with a new laptop category: the dual LCD/E-Ink display laptop.
Because 10.8-inch E-Ink only consumes power when the image changes, it is possible to display information permanently without having any screen draw power.
This opens a ton of possibilities, ranging from having calendar and notifications always visible, to taking notes with an E-Pen, to reading books, airline check-in barcodes – and more.
For people who are anxious about battery life, and if their usage pattern is a fit, using the E-Ink display could easily double the battery life of the laptop. In fact, Lenovo representatives were confident that using only the E-Ink display (for reading), the battery could last for 24 hrs.
For instance, people who read and annotate documents could do it exclusively on the E-Ink display. I often fly International and read technical eBooks with the Kindle app.
The E-Ink is not only lower-power, but it’s also better for your eyes as well since it does not emit blue light (but you need ambient lighting).
To keep the E-Ink display active and updated, Lenovo essentially keeps the laptop running, even when the lid is closed, a bit like how your smartphone would behave.
“Always-on” is a new trend on PC, especially after Qualcomm heavily advocated for, and implemented it in its Snapdragon always-on, always-connected PCs with the help of major OEMs, including Lenovo, which just released the world’s first 5G computer.
But this laptop is running on an Intel processor, and this is proof that the whole PC laptop industry is adopting an “always-on” capability that improves the user experience. No-one likes to wait for a minute after waking up the laptop to sync email etc.
E-Ink display aside, the ThinkBook Plus has a 13.3” FHD color display and can be configured like many other laptops in this class.
Cherry on the cake: there’s also a cordless charging station that uses pins so, you get the same charging speed as wired
More details will be made available between now and March 2020, when it will become available, but we don’t expect any surprises when it comes to CPU, RAM, and SSD options.
E-Ink can be a formidable tool, and we’re really glad that a PC OEM was bold enough to integrate a large E-Ink display in a production PC, skipping the “concept” stage.
Filed in . Read more about CES, CES 2020, Laptops, Lenovo and Lenovo Laptops.