While CES, dubbed the world's greatest consumer tech expo, is the heart of the newest consumer tech to come out in the next few months, it is also a place to show off some wacky concepts and prototypes. Some of which even reach the level of actually being produced.
Lenovo, which is a familiar name in the laptop market, is no exception this year. The company has been toying with e-ink displays, which haven't seen quite a lot of adaption in consumer tech. While the technology is very much popular in eBook readers such as Amazon's Kindle, it is rarely seen in other consumer devices. Russian phone maker Yota did try to make three devices with e-ink. However, in its last venture, the Yotaphone 3 basically bankrupted the company.
Lenovo, which owns the popular business laptop line of Thinkbook and Thinkpad, has the financial capability to create and push these super-niche devices. A few months ago, the company announced the Yoga Book C930, a dual-screen laptop that eschews the traditional laptop with an e-ink display that's used as a keyboard. Now, during CES, Lenovo seems to double down on the rarely seen tech, creating a new laptop that uses an e-ink screen on the reverse side of the display.
Dubbed the ThinkBook Plus, the laptop looks fairly normal opened: It has the standard display on one side, and the keyboard/touchpad on the other. However, on the opposite side of the screen is a 10.8-inch monochrome e-ink display, which can be used when the laptop is closed.
An Intriguing and Amazing combination
The laptop itself is no slouch, as Lenovo allows it to be configured with some of the best ultraportable pieces on laptops. It is configurable with up to a 10th-gen Intel Core i7 processor, 8 or 16GB of DDR4 Ram, and 256 or 512 GB of onboard flash storage. The screen is a gorgeous 13.3 full HD IPS Display. It rocks 3 USB ports, both type-A, and type-C, and has an HDMI port to boot as well. The power button also doubles as the laptop's fingerprint reader, allowing for a one-touch boot/unlock solution.
By all means, this laptop looks like a fairly standard thin and light. The magic, however, happens when you close the laptop and behold the e-ink display.
In a word, the screen is gorgeous. The contrast is great that even in its monochrome template, you can easily differentiate different shades of grey. There's a lot of different ways to use the screen. You can opt to put static images there, acting as a customizable black-and-white sticker board. You can also use it to check emails and schedules as it syncs up with the Windows 10 email and calendar client.
The screen can also act as a sketchpad, a PDF reader, a notepad for OneNote. It also has dedicated access buttons to both Amazon's Alexa and Kindle apps. And for those who need to do a quick Skype call, you can even access that on the e-ink screen.
The laptop becomes available this March, with a starting price of around $1,200. While the starting price isn't anywhere cheap, considering that thin and light prices have been going down recently, consider it an "early adaptors" fee. It'll be interesting to see how much interest this laptop will have once it becomes available to customers. There's no doubt that if the laptop proves to be a success, we'll be seeing more e-ink screens in Lenovo laptops.
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