Lenovo has cooked up a new laptop with a solar panel with sufficient energy-absorbing capability to turn 20 minutes of sunlight into enough charge for an hour of video playback. Give it up for the Lenovo Yoga Solar PC. Lenovo has also revealed a stand-alone USB Type-C solar charging kit.
For now, however, both devices have achieved only concept status for demonstrating new technologies at the currently ongoing Mobile World Congress. Lenovo has not announced any firm plans to put them into production.
Still, that one hour usage from 20 minutes charging time sounds impressive. Of course, it's a best case scenario using direct sunlight. Lenovo hasn't provided any data on what you might call more realistic real-world charging speeds.
The solar panel on the Lenovo Yoga Solar PC essentially covers the whole rear of the display and delivers an energy conversion rate of 24%, which Lenovo claims is one of the highest in the industry.
That's achieved at least in part thanks to so-called "Back Contact Cell" technology, which moves mounting brackets and gridlines to the back of the solar cells, maximising absorption. Lenovo says that, "even in low-light conditions, the panel can still generate power, sustaining battery charge when the PC is idle."
Again, no numbers are put on those broad claims. However, this solar tech doesn't come at the cost of size or weight. "At 15 mm thin and just 1.22 kg, the thin-and-light Yoga Solar PC Concept is the world’s first ultraslim solar-powered PC, " Lenovo says.
Anyway, the Lenovo Yoga Solar PC sports a 14-inch OLED display, Intel Core Ultra Lunar Lake CPU and 32 GB of RAM. Really, the solar panel aside, it looks like a conventional ultrabook. And that's a good thing.
As for the stand-alone USB Type-C charging kit, Lenovo hasn't released any details. But solar panels for charging USB devices are easy enough to come by, so that device is less compelling.
For now, Lenovo isn't saying when or if the Yoga Solar PC will become a retail product. But the hardware looks intriguing. If it doesn't add much to the weight or size of a laptop, why wouldn't you want a bit of extra running time thanks to solar power?
The answer might be price. There's no indication for now how much adding high-efficiency solar power to a laptop might increase the price. But so long as it's not a big premium, it's very interesting.
Of course, you're not going to power a gaming laptop in real time with the sort of solar panel that'll fit on top of the screen. But it might still help you get a little more uptime doing less demanding tasks when you're not gaming. Which is no bad thing.
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