Lenovo Teases Solar-Powered and Foldable-Screen Laptops in Latest Concepts

Lenovo demonstrated 'a laptop with a foldable screen and one that can get extra battery life from solar power,' reports CNBC, emphasizing that 'These laptops are just concepts, meaning they are not commercially available.'
But 'Lenovo, the world's biggest PC maker, has a history of showing off imaginative concepts with some becoming reality, so it's worth keeping an eye on what the Chinese technology giant is up to...'
The latest concepts were unveiled at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona... When fully unfolded, the screen is an 18-inch display [on the Lenovo ThinkBook 'flip' concept]... The screen can then be folded in half horizontally to create two screens — one on the front and one on the back. The entire display can be folded down flat so the laptop turns into a tablet-like device.

Lenovo also showed off a Yoga Solar PC concept, reports Gizmodo, calling it 'relatively thin and light' despite a solar panel in its lid with 'a supposed 24% solar conversion rate':

Lenovo claims they achieved this by maneuvering the gridlines you usually find on a solar panel behind the solar cells, offering more real estate for energy absorption... Lenovo's software showed the power accumulation at around 7 V when facing away from the sunlight and 12 V when facing toward it. It could get more when getting direct sunlight. Despite the presence of the solar panel, the laptop still weighs a little more than 2.6 pounds, which isn't out of the realm of what to expect from most modern laptops.

We should note that the panel isn't generating the required power to run the PC continuously. Lenovo claimed that 20 minutes of direct sunlight will transform into about one hour of video playback battery life. Depending on the CPU and battery, that could be 1/20 of the laptop's battery life.

CNBC had slightly different statistics for the laptop's battery life. 'Lenovo said that the solar panels can absorb even ambient light in a person's surroundings to give a user an extra hour of laptop use at the end of an eight-hour work day...'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.