Lenovo hasn’t even released its futuristic laptop with a rollable screen. But that hasn’t stopped the company from taking that notebook’s core components and remixing it into a whole new thing at MWC 2025.

Officially called the ThinkBook codename Flip AI PC Proof of concept (yes, that is its official name and it’s a real mouthful), the laptop uses the same flexible OLED featured in its rollable sibling, except this time instead of disappearing inside its chassis, the display folds outwards. This allows what is normally a 13-inch panel to double in size to 18.1 inches at a moment’s notice. Notably, because the Flip’s screen bends instead of sliding in and out of the bottom half of the system, Lenovo can utilize the panel’s full area unlike the ThinkBook Rollable, which can only extend up to 16.7 inches.

In its vertical mode, this provides a ton of extra space for documents or multitasking. However, the screen can also be folded back into tablet mode or something akin to a 2-in-1’s tent mode for times when you might want to share your display with someone on the other side of the table.

Sam Rutherford for Engadget

Somewhat impressively, a fancy monitor isn’t the only trick the Flip has. Down below, Lenovo created what it calls a Smart ForcePad, which features a three-layer illuminated dashboard that adds customizable controls and icons to its surface. It’s a neat trick that expands what a basic touchpad can do, though it’s not exactly a huge leap from what we’ve seen on rival machines from Acer and others. Finally, on the inside, the Flip should have solid performance thanks to the inclusion of an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, 32GB of RAM and PCIe SSD storage.

As a fan of anything with a flexible screen, it’s fascinating to see how quickly Lenovo was able to take the components used in the ThinkBook Plus Gen6 Rollable and turn them into something else. That said, as this was a very early prototype (a Lenovo representative said it was only one of two in the world at the time), there are some obvious issues that need to be ironed out before this thing ever gets close to an official release.

The first is that for a system with a screen this tall, its hinge wasn’t fully up to the task of keeping everything stable, as even a light tap would cause the whole panel to sway back and forth in a disconcerting way. The model I used also lacked that kickstand that appears in some of Lenovo’s promotional images, which would have further increased its sturdiness.

However, the biggest potential problem with the Flip may be difficult to address because it’s inherent to its core design. When the laptop is collapsed down into a clamshell for traveling, the way its screen folds exposes the flexible display to items that might scratch it. And while it’s possible to get around this by using a form-fitting laptop sleeve, that seems a bit too dangerous, even for someone like me who’s been using foldable phones for half a decade. Upon further consideration, I wouldn’t be surprised if this design challenge is a big reason Lenovo decided to bring the ThinkBook Rollable to market instead of the Flip.

Currently, Lenovo has no plans to bring the Flip to full production, but even so, it’s nice seeing what a company can come up with when it’s not scared to show off unfinished devices.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/lenovos-codename-flip-is-another-wild-take-on-a-flexible-screen-laptop-230051495.html?src=rss

Lenovo has announced new laptops with generative AI features for this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), including the Yoga Pro 9i Aura edition. Lenovo’s Aura edition branding is the result of a partnership with Intel to create a set of “distinct software, hardware and AI features” that make “computing a more personalized, productive, and protected experience.” The Yoga Pro 9i Aura edition is powered by the Intel Core Ultra processor and ships with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 GPU, which is the company’s most affordable model in the RTX 50 series.

It has a 16-inch 3.2K PureSight Pro display with a double layer of OLED pixels that increases its overall brightness to 1600nits peak, as well as boosts its power efficiency. The display also supports 100 percent sRGB, P3 and Adobe RGB color gamut that provide true-to-life color accuracy. Like the previous versions of the Yoga Pro 9i, the Aura edition comes with the Lenovo Creator Zone, an on-device AI suite that can make third-party video, photo and music applications for creators easier to use. Lenovo’s Yoga Pro 9i Aura Edition will be available starting in the second quarter of 2025, with prices starting at $1,799.

The company has also introduced the 15-inch IdeaPad Slim 3x, a Copilot+ PC that runs on Snapdragon X chip, Qualcomm’s new platform designed to put Copilot+ PCs within reach for more people. IdeaPad Slim 3x can also process AI tasks on device and comes with a dedicated key for Microsoft’s Copilot assistant. One more interesting feature is the device’s open SSD slot that can fit an extra SSD for those who want to expand the laptop’s storage capacity. The model will be available starting this month for at least $649.

Lenovo

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/lenovos-new-ai-laptops-for-mwc-include-the-yoga-pro-9i-aura-edition-and-the-ideapad-slim-3x-230024761.html?src=rss

You might be surprised to learn that the first laptop with built-in solar panels is nearly 15 years old. But to me, the bigger shock is that with all the recent advancements in photovoltaic cells, manufacturers haven’t revisited this idea more often. But at MWC 2025, Lenovo is changing that with its Yoga Solar PC Concept.

Weighing 2.6 pounds and measuring less than 0.6 inches thick, the Yoga Solar PC Concept is essentially the same size as a standard 14-inch clamshell. And because its underlying design isn’t all that different from Lenovo’s standard Yoga family, it doesn’t skimp on specs either. It features an OLED display, up to 32GB of RAM, a decent-sized 50.2 WHr battery and even a 2MP IR webcam for use with Windows Hello.

However, all those components aren’t nearly as important as the solar cells embedded in its lid. Lenovo says the panels use Back Contact Cell technology so that its mounting brackets and gridlines can be placed on the rear of the cells. This allows the panels to offer up to 24 percent solar energy conversion, which is pretty good as that matches the efficiency you get from many high-end home solar systems. Furthermore, the PC also supports Dynamic Solar Tracking to automatically adjust the cells’ settings to maximize the amount of energy they can gather.

Lenovo says this means the Yoga Solar PC can generate enough juice to play an hour of videos after only 20 minutes in the sun. But what might be more impressive is that even when the laptop is indoors, it can still harvest power from as little as 0.3 watts of light to help top off its battery. Finally, to help you understand how much power it’s gathering, Lenovo created a bespoke app to track how much light the panels absorb.

Unfortunately, Lenovo doesn’t have any plans to turn this concept into a full commercial device. But after playing around with it, I was pleasantly surprised to see how solid and sturdy its chassis felt. Unlike a lot of prototype devices, the Yoga Solar PC Concept doesn’t feel like that much of a stretch technologically compared to other notebooks on sale today. Its PV cells sit safely behind a sheet of glass (or possibly plastic, Lenovo wouldn’t confirm which one) while also adding a bit of distinctive visual flair.

However, the biggest hurdle (and possibly a big reason why we haven’t seen more laptops like this) is that for people who want to use solar panels to charge their devices, it’s probably easier and more versatile to rely on a standalone solar array instead of something built-in to the gadget itself. Regardless, Lenovo’s Yoga Solar PC is a surprisingly polished concept that I’d love to see get more attention in the future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/the-lenovo-solar-pc-concept-feels-like-a-device-whose-time-has-come-230022723.html?src=rss

The ThinkBook line has sort of become Lenovo’s de facto testing ground for far-out ideas and ambitious concepts. See the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable we saw just a couple months ago at CES. But at MWC 2025, the company is pushing things further than ever through the new ThinkBook 16p Gen 6 and four of its display accessories — which range from practical add-ons to something that’s more like a Tamagotchi.

The ThinkBook 16P powering all of Lenovo’s crazy concept accessories isn’t all that different from the company’s previous 16-inch workstations. It sports up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 2785HX chip with as much as 64GB of RAM, 2TB of PCIe storage and an NVIDIA RTX 5070 GPU. You get the choice of either a 3.2K IPS display with a 165Hz refresh rate or a slightly lower-res 2.5K IPS panel with a faster 240Hz refresh. There’s also plenty of connectivity including dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, three USB-A jacks, a full-size HDMI 2.1 and a card reader.

Sam Rutherford for Engadget

One interesting addition is that Lenovo included a discrete NPU (separate from its main chip) that offers up to 32 TOPS of additional performance. This should provide a nice boost, particularly for anyone who needs to run demanding AI tasks locally. That said, for the rest of us lay folk, it’s largely unnecessary.

However, the real spectacle is Lenovo’s assortment of accessories. They all connect to the ThinkBook 16P using the company’s Magic Bay docking system, which was first introduced to this product family a couple generations ago. For people who constantly yearn for extra space to multitask while traveling, Lenovo has two add-ons to choose from. The Magic Bay 2nd Display Concept is a small 8-inch screen that attaches magnetically to the ThinkBook 16P. It can be used simply as an external monitor or as an AI dashboard that displays widgets, messaging apps and other tools.

On the flipside, the Magic Bay Dual Display Concept adds not one but two additional 13.3-inch panels that flank the notebook’s primary screen, giving you a huge amount of real estate for pretty much anything. In addition to using the laptop’s mounting system, this prototype also features a built-in kickstand to help keep the whole contraption stable. This is important because while it is rather complicated compared to most accessories, once you get everything set up, it really does a good job of recreating the multi-monitor workstations people have at home or in their office.

Lenovo

As for Lenovo’s remaining two concepts, they are so new the company wasn’t able to show them off during my preview session. The Tiko Pro Concept looks like an even more streamlined take on 2nd Display, as it’s a slim panel with an extra-wide aspect ratio that’s meant to sit across the top of the laptop’s display, sort of like an external notification shade. Meanwhile, the non-pro Tiko Concept is a circular screen that houses an AI companion with its own set of emoji-based faces, gesture-based responses and more. 

In case that’s not enough, Lenovo even teased a cat-themed headband that adds little ears to your robotic friend. At this point, you may be asking how the Tiko is supposed to increase your productivity? And for that, I can only guess that having a friendly face around might boost your mood and thus improve your productivity. Or at the very least, it could be a more charming way of seeing stuff like Slack reactions. Honestly, I have no idea, and I’m not sure Lenovo does either.

Now I have to stress again that all of these accessories are concepts, so there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever officially go on sale. Lenovo says they are merely prototypes meant to help expand and explore how its Magic Bay docking system could be used in the future. But in a time when so many PC makers seem to be having trouble thinking up ways to innovate, it’s clear Lenovo isn’t being shy about thinking outside the box.

Sadly, the ThinkBook 16P Gen 6 is not slated to be available in North America, but for those in Europe and Asia, keep an eye out for it to go on sale sometime this spring or summer.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/lenovo-gave-its-latest-16-inch-thinkbook-a-bevy-of-funky-concept-screen-accessories-230008238.html?src=rss

I love a game that screams things like “neato!” and “godlike!” while I’m feverishly pressing buttons and darting my eyes around the screen, trying to make my fingers work as fast as my brain. My skills in the Playdate game XTRIS are definitely not godlike, but there’s just something about that classic arcade announcer voice that makes me think each time, “this is the one where I’ll finally crack the leaderboard.” (It never is).

XTRIS is a $3 game by Fletch Makes Stuff that’ll have you chasing a moving X around a board made up of either four, five or six tiles. The timer’s set to 60 seconds, and in that time you have to land on the X as many times as possible. Each X you collect will go tumbling dramatically off the grid and be added to your score, which is faintly displayed in the background.

If it sounds easy, it’s not. The X moves fast, and as you race after your target using the D-pad to control the movement of a black square, things become increasingly intense. The music builds like an alarm that’s telling you time is almost up, and flames start shooting up from the bottom of the screen. All the while, the announcer (voiced by Jordan Carroll) is shouting words of encouragement that start to feel a little ominous by the end. It’s wonderfully chaotic. Despite the relatively simple presentation, XTRIS really lives up to its promise of being a “juicy arcade action directly into the palm of your hand.”

For each of the three levels — Tetromino, Bridge and Squiggle — you’ll be able to see how other players scored, and how you stack up against them. And once you’ve played a certain level a few times, you’ll be shown your own score trends to see how you’re improving (or plateauing). I keep telling myself, “just one more try” when I finish a round, and we all know how that goes.

There’s a Zen Mode for each level as well, so you can work on your dexterity without the time crunch and with a chiller track playing. If you poke around in the menu, you can also find some unlockable characters and symbols to switch up the appearance of the game, swapping the X for something like a frog or a slice of pizza. XTRIS is available on the Playdate Catalog now for $3.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xtris-is-a-fast-paced-arcade-style-playdate-game-you-wont-be-able-to-put-down-224738429.html?src=rss

According to Rolling Stone, employees with the Federal Aviation Administration were told on Friday to “begin finding tens of millions of dollars for a Starlink deal,” after The Washington Post reported that the FAA may cancel its $2.4 billion contract with Verizon to overhaul the US’s airspace management systems and go with Elon Musk’s company instead. Whether the FAA has actually dropped its Verizon deal in favor of Starlink has yet to be confirmed publicly. In a statement posted on X in response to the initial report last week, the FAA claimed it’s “been considering the use of Starlink since the prior administration.”

Anonymous sources told Rolling Stone that the orders from FAA officials on Friday were “delivered verbally” to staff, in an “unusual” move. It comes a few days after Musk claimed on X that the situation around air traffic control communications is “extremely dire,” saying the existing system (which he wrongly attributed to Verizon before later adding a correction) is “breaking down very rapidly.” He went on to say that “Starlink terminals are being sent at NO COST to the taxpayer on an emergency basis to restore air traffic control connectivity.”

Bloomberg, citing sources close to the matter, previously reported that 4,000 Starlink terminals were being sent to help upgrade the FAA’s networks, which the FAA confirmed. As recently as Wednesday, though, the FAA said in statements to The Washington Post and other publications that it had not made a decision about its Verizon deal. The agency is one of many that has been hit by layoffs led by Musk’s DOGE over the last few weeks, with hundreds of FAA employees fired in February.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/faa-reportedly-ordered-staff-to-find-millions-of-dollars-to-fund-starlink-deal-205236985.html?src=rss

Firefly Aerospace’s first attempt at landing on the moon was a success. The company, which is working with NASA under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, announced early Sunday morning that its Blue Ghost lander softly touched down on the moon, and it’s upright and communicating with the team back home. Blue Ghost landed at 3:34AM ET in a region known as Mare Crisium. While Firefly’s lander isn’t the first commercial spacecraft to land on the moon, it is the first to land properly — Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus ended up on its side last year after a faster-than-planned descent.

Blue Ghost and the NASA instruments it’s carrying are expected to remain in operation for about 14 Earth days. After that, lunar night will begin. If all goes as planned, the lander will capture images in the leadup to lunar night and a few hours after darkness falls, getting high-definition imagery of a total eclipse, the lunar sunset and other moments to document the behaviour of levitating lunar dust. NASA is also testing instruments that can drill and collect samples from the surface.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 launched on January 15 and reached lunar orbit about a month later. The team says it’s already sent over 27 GB of data back to Earth from its journey. “Just through transit to the Moon, Firefly’s mission has already delivered the most science data to date for the NASA CLPS initiative,” Shea Ferring, Firefly’s Chief Technology Officer, said in a statement, noting that the hardest part of the mission is over. On X, the company shared a photo showing the lander’s shadow on the surface of the moon following its successful touchdown, and joked, “The lander saw her shadow, 2 more weeks of ops!”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/fireflys-blue-ghost-lander-successfully-touched-down-on-the-moon-155728834.html?src=rss