Mobility News

See Lenovo’s New Foldable PC In Action

CRNtv gets an up close look at Lenovo’s latest devices, including a prototype of the foldable PC set to launch in 2020.

From the world’s first foldable PC to the ultra-small ThinkCentre Nano, the future of laptops was on full display at Lenovo’s Accelerate conference in Orlando, Fla. last week. Pascal Bourguet, VP and North America Chief Category Officer of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group discussed what partners need to know in an interview with CRNtv.

Tell us about your latest product announcements.

Bourguet: “ThinkBook is the first category we are creating here at Accelerate. Then, we come in with the thinnest and smallest desktop in the world, hosting the 8th generation CPU and category creation. Finally, with the announcement of foldable laptop, very exciting category, probably the future because it’s representing a different type of use case on the laptop.”

What kind of uses cases are you envisioning with this laptop? Would you say it’s for work or for play?

Bourguet: “You could use the foldable display without a keyboard and mainly with some touch capabilities. In terms of screen sizes, we are working with different sizes of screens because you may say I would like to keep my 13-inch screen size but then you are folding it and it’s a much larger screen than 13-inch. That would give the opportunity to work or to play with a much larger screen than 13-inch, which is much easier to carry.”

Lenovo showed off a prototype of the foldable PC at Accelerate. The device will officially launch in 2020 as a member of the ThinkPad X1 Family. Kazuo Fujii, an engineer of the device, discussed more details with CRNtv.

What were some of the biggest challenges in creating the device?

Fujii: Yea so we’ve been working on this for three years. In a normal tablet, it operates with a cover glass in the top but this one we cannot because it’s whole. So, how to protect the screen without having the cover glass - that was kind of a challenge. Also, as you see, you almost don’t see any crease. So, that is a portion we worked on a lot from the engineering side.

The PC will be available in 2020. How will you improve the device over the next year or so?

Fujii: Yea, so, we still have a lot of things to work on like improving the UX and improving the software, so that when we deliver it to the customer we want to make it the perfect system so that’s why we take time. But, at the same time, we want to have feedback from the users so that’s why we announced this one.”