Welcome back to Multicore. This is Instruction Set for the week of Monday, February 26th.
This week’s edition comes to you from the show floor of the Fira Gran Via convention centre in Barcelona, where Mobile World Congress has officially just kicked off. Here’s my roundup of what’s been going on and what I saw today.
So as promised, Lenovo brought along a transparent laptop.
The ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop is a 17.3” machine with a see-through screen. It’s a 720p MicroLED panel that can get as bright as 1,000 nits with all its pixels set to white. When the pixels are “black”, though, they appear at 55% transparency, allowing you to see behind the display.
This machine is just a concept, so it’s probably not worth spending too much time speculating on design decisions like the flat-glass keyboard that works as a drawing tablet. I’m not sure, though, that Lenovo’s proposed selling point of peering through the screen at the thing you’re drawing is going to win too many people over. You might be better off with an iPad.
Still, no-one knew what tiny hard drives were for until the iPod came along. Perhaps someone will have a great idea for laptop-sized transparent MicroLED screens now that they’re out there.
Humane doesn’t have a big official presence at this show, but I did see a representative giving demos at the Qualcomm booth; the AI Pin runs on an unnamed Snapdragon processor.
I’ve been sceptical of this thing, but I have to admit it looks pretty cool in person. The pin itself is smaller than I imagined, the laser projection is bright and clear, and the gesture-based interface is surprisingly responsive.
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