We're visiting Lenovo at CES to check out their Lenovo Thinkbook Plus Gen 5.
And let's go somewhere a little bit quieter to talk about it.
What? Now you might think me a fool, but I knew exactly what was going to happen
because this is the Plus Gen 5 Hybrid. And what does that mean?
Well, that means it's not just a laptop that runs Windows,
it's also an Android tablet. And cool, anybody can dual boot Android or emulate Android.
But it's not quite like that. As you may have noticed, Windows is still operating.
What the heck? Well, they've done some pretty clever work here,
and I'm really excited to talk about it. So, this laptop is powered by an Intel Core 7 Ultra 155H,
which puts it kind of firmly in the thin and light category.
Not the most powerful processor, but still meteor-like and one of Intel's latest.
It also comes equipped with 32 gigs of RAM on here.
The laptop itself is made of aluminum, with brushed aluminum on the sides.
The bottom panel, however, is plastic, but it's still a very premium finish,
and I think looks pretty slick. It comes with a Thunderbolt 4 port on either side,
as well as a combo headphone jack.
We also see at the back nothing but just some venting.
We have lots of vents on the side, which bodes well for cooling.
And one of the biggest giveaways is that this is a tablet, as you can see these cameras out here.
We'll talk about those in a minute. Let's keep on the laptop front.
The laptop itself contains two speakers, but when you are docked, you get to take advantage of the additional four speakers
that are in the tablet, so you get six speakers. So, theoretically, it could get pretty loud.
Who knows how good it will sound. Again, thin and light laptops, not exactly famous for sound quality.
So right now we're hearing the audio from just the two speakers in the bottom of the laptop.
And listen, it's pretty loud in here, and these don't sound very good.
But, when we attach our tablet,
it starts playing the audio through all of the speakers on the device.
Including the six on the side and the bottom.
And it still sounds not that great.
But, you get to take advantage of a touch screen.
It comes with Lenovo Stylus. You have a great touch pad.
But the real cool thing is that if at any moment I want to switch,
I can just press this one button, and suddenly,
I'm an Android, baby. And now we have an entirely separate Lenovo tablet.
We have a webcam on here, and a webcam shutter,
something that you typically don't see on a tablet. It uses a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1,
which is the highest it's currently available in tablets. It has 256 gigs of storage in its own right,
and it has 12 gigabytes of RAM on top of the 32 gigabytes that are already in the laptop.
Now, those are not shareable between the two operating systems.
It's exclusive to this device. So, instead of, say, like, dual booting, or even using a virtual machine,
you're really literally just running two devices that combine into a convenient form factor.
It runs Android 13, and, I mean, we're talking about the tablet,
which is also the screen, so let's talk about that.
They have a 2.8K OLED display that runs at 60 hertz.
Clearly, being a thin and light, they're not really going for the gaming aspect.
They don't even tout a GPU. You're going to be using your Snapdragon graphics or your Intel XE integrated graphics.
On the top of the display is where you get to find your volume buttons.
You also have, on the bottom here, a power button.
Sadly, there's no fingerprint reader on this power button or anywhere on this tablet,
but it looks like we have Windows facial recognition.
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,
so it might be less secure than the Windows version of the face recognition,
but, again, still nice to have some sort of biometric option here.
And the cameras, two 13 megapixel cameras that one is an ultra-wide, 0.6x zoom.
Not sure exactly the degree of field of view, but we can go up to eight times,
but that's just digital punching. That looks nasty.
But, hey, it's a tablet. I've never used Lenovo's camera software, so I'm not going to comment on that,
but I don't know what AI scan means.
Stop putting the word AI where it doesn't belong, Lenovo.
Stupid. But now things get interesting, which is how the heck do we connect to the PC?
We have two slots on each side that connect them to these plastic posts,
and then here's where we have the connection.
It's a proprietary connector, but it is a DisplayPort,
as well as we have our charging port and a data port for USB.
So if you wanted, you could transfer a file via USB cable to your computer.
But that would be super inconvenient, wouldn't it?
They've actually thought about that, and they include a 10 Gigabyte hybrid folder.
So anything that you have saved in the hybrid folder will be saved to both
the 256 gigabytes of storage on the tablet,
as well as the one terabyte of storage on the laptop itself.
It's basically doing an advanced kind of copy function,
and I asked Lenovo about the size. It's only a 10 Gigabyte folder.
It's not user-adjustable, which is a little bit frustrating,
because, say, you're maybe, I don't know, transferring movies onto your tablet to watch,
it would be nice to be able to have, like, a larger file.
Or if you're shooting 4K video on those 13 megapixel cameras,
maybe you have a lot of files that you want to transfer once or have on both.
It would be nice to adjust it, but I still think it's really cool, because look at this, I just take this off,
and I can go to my hybrid folder here,
and I have the exact same Word document.
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,
but my Windows is being held hostage.
They also thought of this, and it's not the most elegant solution.
I would have loved to see some sort of, like, pass-through between the two devices.
But if we go into Windows, we're able to use something called Hybrid Stream,
which will open up the Android tablet in a window so that I can use it.
And you can still use it with a mouse. You can still click a text field and type in it.
It totally captures it, as well as, even if I move it down here,
I can still use it as a touchscreen. So it's not as good.
Another thing to think about is that this also has its own Bluetooth chip in it.
It has its own Wi-Fi chip. This is the same deal.
So you can be connected with a different set of mouse and keyboard to the tablet or here.
One concern I would have is that maybe you were using it in tablet mode with your mouse and keyboard.
Maybe the transfer won't be that easy. I imagine Bluetooth has gotten pretty good about multi-point connections,
that the handoff should happen.
I guess you would just activate it in Windows.
But this is all these considerations about trying to make two devices talk together.
It's pretty complex. One thing we realize is that if you turn off your laptop,
it's not going to turn off both the tablet. It will just turn off your laptop.
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?
Like if I lock it...
I mean, it's acting as a single computer now, so we should be able to turn it back on.
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
and accidentally lose the bottom by dropping it, you know?
That would be tragic. We're going to break a nice piece of hardware. So they actually do have a limit.
If you go too far back, your tablet is now locked in so I can pick it up like this.
If it's less than that or if it's closed like this, I can't pull the top off by accident.
When I'm trying to shut it closed. Pretty nice.
Obviously, there's still a little bit of software kinks to work out for them, but they got time.
It's coming out in Q2 of this year and it's going to be retailing for $19.99.
They're only going to have the one SKU. It's not going to be customizable.
It's just going to be 32 gigs of RAM with the Intel Core i7 Ultra,
sorry, Core Ultra 7, the 1TB drive, the Qualcomm Gen 1 Plus in there,
the 256 gigs of storage plus 12 gigs of RAM plus the cameras.
It's a lot actually for a $2,000 product.
It's pretty dang cool. You also get this guy.
It's a slim and light form factor. What do you want? It's a good look and display.
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.
Think about this. Say you're somebody who has to do some rendering or you're letting a program compile
and it's using up a lot of your resources on your laptop.
You can always just switch to your tablet and then do other stuff like read documentation
or anything else that you need there.
It also gives you the benefit of carrying only one thing.
If you are somebody who likes to carry a lot of devices, you just have to get your laptop.
The weight of it, surprisingly small.
Man, this is so cool. And while there is two batteries in this technically,
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.
So it's not like you get a little bit of extra battery life on the Windows side.
In the event that your Windows machine runs out of battery, you can switch to your tablet and still get work done.
It's pretty smart. For me, this is the most convincing two-in-one laptop I've seen yet.
I've always found that folding laptops 180 degrees makes them feel kind of bulky
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
solves all the problems because Windows has done this before, right?
The surface lineup involved attaching a whole tablet,
like I think the original Surface Pro or something, was a big tablet.
All of the internals were in the back and you'd attach it to like a headless base
that didn't do anything, which was a similar idea,
but it solves the problem of making the bottom be like a useless keyboard.
It's a whole other machine and the price is fairly reasonable. You get two devices and a pen.
But you know what else is reasonable? Subscribing to ShortCircuit.
Thank you so much for watching. If you want more CES coverage, I don't know,
maybe this will be the last one that comes out, who knows, but subscribe.