Lenovo Transparent Laptop Hands-On: Totally Cool

Have you ever seen a transparent laptop? Maybe in a science fiction movie. But at his MWC this year, we got to see a real laptop with a transparent display and keyboard top. Though a concept for now, the Lenovo ThinkBook transparent display laptop is just so, so, so impractically cool.

As it did with last year’s rollable laptops, Lenovo is showing off its future technology with a working concept unit. The ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop features a transparent MicroLED display similar to the one we saw at his MWC earlier this year. It is sandwiched between two layers of glass and is transparent. And when I saw it for the first time and looked through it, the effect was amazing.

It was even more impressive when I could see the keyboard for a few seconds even when I closed the laptop lid. Lenovo has confirmed that there is a keyboard timeout feature to enhance this effect.

The keyboard itself is also made of glass. It took him more than a minute to type “androidauthority.com” into his browser’s address bar. You can now type this URL in your sleep in 2 seconds. It’s not practical for typing with zero haptic feedback, but at least the colors change between neon blue, green, purple, red, etc., making it even more gorgeous.

And forget about trackpads. I couldn’t feel my limits, so I kept gesturing and moving the cursor, and before I knew it I was touching left and right, but nothing happened. I had to imagine a trackpad in the middle of that glass plate and aim for it.

However, sometimes the keyboard disappears and you’re left with a large canvas on which you can draw or doodle with your stylus.

Let’s get back to the star of the show: that display. His idea here for Lenovo is not only to strengthen its R&D capabilities, but also to find some potential real-world use cases. You can see through the display and interact with the world behind it. Imagine an Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3 without the headset. You can draw and annotate what you see.

But so that the laptop can also see what you’re looking at, Lenovo has included a camera on the bottom of the back. I tested this on a (fake) sunflower plant. The laptop recognized it. Again, it’s a proof of concept, but you can imagine what this kind of simple interaction with the real world would be like. Especially when it looks natural, you can layer something on top of it, and the technology separating you from it is literally invisible.

Now, obviously, this is a concept, so there are a lot of question marks around it. Privacy is the main thing. Again, it’s transparent so anyone from behind your laptop can see everything you’re doing. See the photo below. This is the display seen from the back.

The brightness is also set at 1000 nits on this unit and cannot be changed. In the dark basement where Lenovo unveiled its laptop, anything white blinded my irises. The smudge and glare from brightly colored objects far away was like burning my retinas. Things were noticeably better when I looked at the laptop in a bright room. It also has technology that allows you to adjust the brightness. I just wasn’t ready for this concept.

But still, black people remain the biggest challenge for displays like this. Black is the absence of light, so when viewing something with a dark background, the depth of the black will vary depending on the environment and what’s behind the display. It was okay if it was dark. If it was bright, I could see through it.

Lenovo said it is considering on-demand opacity solutions to 1) solve privacy issues and 2) get closer to true Blackness.

And then there’s also the fragile glass nature of the entire setup. He doesn’t want to be carrying around two large pieces of glass with no edges or protection.

Even putting all the obvious shortcomings aside, this technology is as remarkable as it is pointless. At this point. But after a few years, will the problem be solved? Well, let’s see.