Credit: Unsplash
Forget the numpad, you get a whole second screen!
I have a few friends who dabble in artistry, specifically of the digital variety. Modern drawing tablets have definitely come a long way in the past decade; they’re more receptive to input and feature lots of handy shortcut buttons. However, there’s a bit of a flaw in them: they don’t mesh super well with laptops. Digital artists, or at least the ones I know, tend to draw on their tablets with one hand and use their other hand to work keyboard shortcuts. If you’re working on a laptop, you have to orient your tablet either next to or in front of it in a very awkward way.
If you’re a digital artist with a preference for laptops, then Lenovo’s next iteration of Thinkbook Plus laptop may be of interest to you. According to one Evan Blass, a known source of gadget and electronic leaks, Lenovo is cooking up a Thinkbook Plus laptop with an entire mini tablet screen baked right into the keyboard in the place where a numpad would usually be. The detail he leaked also showed a drawing stylus next to the screen, so assuming it’s the real McCoy, it’s most likely designed with digital artistry in mind.
Have you guys seen this yet? 17-inch ThinkBook Plus from Lenovo… pic.twitter.com/OElc5ZM3pb
— Ev (@evleaks) October 31, 2021
Lenovo already has the ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 in the pipeline, first revealed at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show back in January. As such, if this image is real, then we likely won’t hear any concrete details about until early next year at least. Still, if this idea sounds appealing to you, keep an eye on Lenovo’s goings-on, as you might finally get a decent middle ground between laptop and tablet.
