Lenovo's Laptop Concept is Fully Transparent, But the Point Isn't Entirely Clear

An anonymous reader shares a report from the ongoing Mobile World Congress trade show: This year's big scrum gatherer was Lenovo's long-rumored transparent laptop. It's real. It functions surprisingly well and -- nearest anyone can tell -- its existence is a testament to form over function. That's a perfectly fine thing to be when you're a concept device. When it comes to actually shipping a product, however, that's another conversation entirely. Broadly speaking, it looks like a laptop, with a transparent pane where the screen should be. It's perhaps best understood as a kind of augmented reality device, in the sense that its graphics are overlaid on whatever happens to be behind it.

It's a crowd pleaser, with a futuristic air to it that embodies all manner of sci-fi tech tropes. The transparent display has become a kind of shorthand for future tech in stock art, and it's undeniably neat to see the thing in action. The bottom of the device is covered in a large capacitive touch surface. This area serves as both a keyboard and a large stylus-compatible drawing surface. The flat surface can't compete with real, tactile keyboards, of course. Typing isn't the greatest experience here, as evidenced by previous dual-screen Lenovo laptops. But that's the tradeoff for the versatility of the virtual version.

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