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We're visiting Lenovo at CES to check out their Lenovo Thinkbook Plus Gen 5.

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And let's go somewhere a little bit quieter to talk about it.

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What? Now you might think me a fool, but I knew exactly what was going to happen

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because this is the Plus Gen 5 Hybrid. And what does that mean?

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Well, that means it's not just a laptop that runs Windows,

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it's also an Android tablet. And cool, anybody can dual boot Android or emulate Android.

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But it's not quite like that. As you may have noticed, Windows is still operating.

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What the heck? Well, they've done some pretty clever work here,

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and I'm really excited to talk about it. So, this laptop is powered by an Intel Core 7 Ultra 155H,

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which puts it kind of firmly in the thin and light category.

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Not the most powerful processor, but still meteor-like and one of Intel's latest.

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It also comes equipped with 32 gigs of RAM on here.

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The laptop itself is made of aluminum, with brushed aluminum on the sides.

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The bottom panel, however, is plastic, but it's still a very premium finish,

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and I think looks pretty slick. It comes with a Thunderbolt 4 port on either side,

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as well as a combo headphone jack.

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We also see at the back nothing but just some venting.

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We have lots of vents on the side, which bodes well for cooling.

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And one of the biggest giveaways is that this is a tablet, as you can see these cameras out here.

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We'll talk about those in a minute. Let's keep on the laptop front.

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The laptop itself contains two speakers, but when you are docked, you get to take advantage of the additional four speakers

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that are in the tablet, so you get six speakers. So, theoretically, it could get pretty loud.

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Who knows how good it will sound. Again, thin and light laptops, not exactly famous for sound quality.

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So right now we're hearing the audio from just the two speakers in the bottom of the laptop.

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And listen, it's pretty loud in here, and these don't sound very good.

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But, when we attach our tablet,

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it starts playing the audio through all of the speakers on the device.

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Including the six on the side and the bottom.

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And it still sounds not that great.

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But, you get to take advantage of a touch screen.

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It comes with Lenovo Stylus. You have a great touch pad.

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But the real cool thing is that if at any moment I want to switch,

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I can just press this one button, and suddenly,

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I'm an Android, baby. And now we have an entirely separate Lenovo tablet.

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We have a webcam on here, and a webcam shutter,

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something that you typically don't see on a tablet. It uses a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1,

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which is the highest it's currently available in tablets. It has 256 gigs of storage in its own right,

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and it has 12 gigabytes of RAM on top of the 32 gigabytes that are already in the laptop.

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Now, those are not shareable between the two operating systems.

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It's exclusive to this device. So, instead of, say, like, dual booting, or even using a virtual machine,

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you're really literally just running two devices that combine into a convenient form factor.

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It runs Android 13, and, I mean, we're talking about the tablet,

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which is also the screen, so let's talk about that.

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They have a 2.8K OLED display that runs at 60 hertz.

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Clearly, being a thin and light, they're not really going for the gaming aspect.

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They don't even tout a GPU. You're going to be using your Snapdragon graphics or your Intel XE integrated graphics.

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On the top of the display is where you get to find your volume buttons.

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You also have, on the bottom here, a power button.

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Sadly, there's no fingerprint reader on this power button or anywhere on this tablet,

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but it looks like we have Windows facial recognition.

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It looks like you can take advantage of face unlock. I don't know if it uses the IR sensors that it will use for Windows Hello,

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so it might be less secure than the Windows version of the face recognition,

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but, again, still nice to have some sort of biometric option here.

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And the cameras, two 13 megapixel cameras that one is an ultra-wide, 0.6x zoom.

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Not sure exactly the degree of field of view, but we can go up to eight times,

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but that's just digital punching. That looks nasty.

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But, hey, it's a tablet. I've never used Lenovo's camera software, so I'm not going to comment on that,

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but I don't know what AI scan means.

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Stop putting the word AI where it doesn't belong, Lenovo.

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Stupid. But now things get interesting, which is how the heck do we connect to the PC?

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We have two slots on each side that connect them to these plastic posts,

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and then here's where we have the connection.

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It's a proprietary connector, but it is a DisplayPort,

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as well as we have our charging port and a data port for USB.

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So if you wanted, you could transfer a file via USB cable to your computer.

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But that would be super inconvenient, wouldn't it?

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They've actually thought about that, and they include a 10 Gigabyte hybrid folder.

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So anything that you have saved in the hybrid folder will be saved to both

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the 256 gigabytes of storage on the tablet,

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as well as the one terabyte of storage on the laptop itself.

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It's basically doing an advanced kind of copy function,

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and I asked Lenovo about the size. It's only a 10 Gigabyte folder.

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It's not user-adjustable, which is a little bit frustrating,

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because, say, you're maybe, I don't know, transferring movies onto your tablet to watch,

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it would be nice to be able to have, like, a larger file.

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Or if you're shooting 4K video on those 13 megapixel cameras,

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maybe you have a lot of files that you want to transfer once or have on both.

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It would be nice to adjust it, but I still think it's really cool, because look at this, I just take this off,

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and I can go to my hybrid folder here,

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and I have the exact same Word document.

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Look at that. It's on both of them. When you have the tablet docked, you get to take advantage of the touchpad and the keyboard,

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but my Windows is being held hostage.

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They also thought of this, and it's not the most elegant solution.

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I would have loved to see some sort of, like, pass-through between the two devices.

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But if we go into Windows, we're able to use something called Hybrid Stream,

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which will open up the Android tablet in a window so that I can use it.

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And you can still use it with a mouse. You can still click a text field and type in it.

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It totally captures it, as well as, even if I move it down here,

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I can still use it as a touchscreen. So it's not as good.

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Another thing to think about is that this also has its own Bluetooth chip in it.

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It has its own Wi-Fi chip. This is the same deal.

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So you can be connected with a different set of mouse and keyboard to the tablet or here.

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One concern I would have is that maybe you were using it in tablet mode with your mouse and keyboard.

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Maybe the transfer won't be that easy. I imagine Bluetooth has gotten pretty good about multi-point connections,

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that the handoff should happen.

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I guess you would just activate it in Windows.

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But this is all these considerations about trying to make two devices talk together.

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It's pretty complex. One thing we realize is that if you turn off your laptop,

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it's not going to turn off both the tablet. It will just turn off your laptop.

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So you'll have to remember to turn off both of them. However, if I press it just to put it to sleep, does that put both of them to sleep?

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Like if I lock it...

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I mean, it's acting as a single computer now, so we should be able to turn it back on.

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We're back. Now, one thing that they want to make sure that you don't do is carry this from the top of it

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and accidentally lose the bottom by dropping it, you know?

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That would be tragic. We're going to break a nice piece of hardware. So they actually do have a limit.

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If you go too far back, your tablet is now locked in so I can pick it up like this.

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If it's less than that or if it's closed like this, I can't pull the top off by accident.

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When I'm trying to shut it closed. Pretty nice.

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Obviously, there's still a little bit of software kinks to work out for them, but they got time.

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It's coming out in Q2 of this year and it's going to be retailing for $19.99.

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They're only going to have the one SKU. It's not going to be customizable.

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It's just going to be 32 gigs of RAM with the Intel Core i7 Ultra,

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sorry, Core Ultra 7, the 1TB drive, the Qualcomm Gen 1 Plus in there,

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the 256 gigs of storage plus 12 gigs of RAM plus the cameras.

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It's a lot actually for a $2,000 product.

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It's pretty dang cool. You also get this guy.

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It's a slim and light form factor. What do you want? It's a good look and display.

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They definitely got a good look and display. For me, what I think is really exciting about this is just there's so many use cases that we could come up with.

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Think about this. Say you're somebody who has to do some rendering or you're letting a program compile

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and it's using up a lot of your resources on your laptop.

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You can always just switch to your tablet and then do other stuff like read documentation

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or anything else that you need there.

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It also gives you the benefit of carrying only one thing.

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If you are somebody who likes to carry a lot of devices, you just have to get your laptop.

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The weight of it, surprisingly small.

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Man, this is so cool. And while there is two batteries in this technically,

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it's not like the tablet's going to charge your laptop. Obviously, the laptop's going to pass through energy to get to the display and it will charge the tablet.

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So it's not like you get a little bit of extra battery life on the Windows side.

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In the event that your Windows machine runs out of battery, you can switch to your tablet and still get work done.

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It's pretty smart. For me, this is the most convincing two-in-one laptop I've seen yet.

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I've always found that folding laptops 180 degrees makes them feel kind of bulky

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and makes them really hard to use as a tablet. But being able to just pull out and have your whole system in here and here

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solves all the problems because Windows has done this before, right?

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The surface lineup involved attaching a whole tablet,

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like I think the original Surface Pro or something, was a big tablet.

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All of the internals were in the back and you'd attach it to like a headless base

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that didn't do anything, which was a similar idea,

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but it solves the problem of making the bottom be like a useless keyboard.

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It's a whole other machine and the price is fairly reasonable. You get two devices and a pen.

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But you know what else is reasonable? Subscribing to ShortCircuit.

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Thank you so much for watching. If you want more CES coverage, I don't know,

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maybe this will be the last one that comes out, who knows, but subscribe.