Lenovo has turned up at the Mobile World Congress in Spain with an attachable laptop bauble that wants to be your AI mate.
Lenovo has strapped a little circular puck to the top of a laptop screen, which clicks onto the rear using the magnetic Magic Bay mount and runs an animated sidekick called Tiko that you can boss about by voice or text.
It will play your music, open web pages and answer questions, plus it responds to emojis, including a book icon that makes it put on glasses and “read” while you work.
Lenovo says it wants to sell the Magic Bay add-on later this year, which is corporate for “we will see how much people will pay for a googly-eyed widget”.
It cooked up a second AI companion concept, a tabletop robot with a swivelling head that looks like a desk lamp, got recruited into the helpdesk. It packs cameras, microphones and a projector so it can turn your notes or doodles into digital files, then throw a presentation up on the wall like it is running your meeting for you.
Lenovo’s promo video goes full sci-fi brochure, promising a workmate that bridges physical and digital worlds, tracks gestures, summarises tasks and keeps everything “organised” without you switching apps. It is pitched as on-device intelligence at your desk, secure and always ready, which is exactly what you would say right before someone asks what it does when the Wi-Fi drops.
The naming looks messy, with “AI Sphere” still lurking in its YouTube description like an abandoned brainstorm that refused to die.
If you prefer your laptops without desk toys, Lenovo showed a ThinkBook concept with a second removable screen that fastens to the lid. You can shift that display down onto the keyboard deck and use the keyboard wirelessly, or run the extra panel as a portable monitor with a cable, which at least solves a real problem instead of inventing a new one.
Then there is the Yoga Book Pro 3D concept, which uses a directional backlight and eye tracking to fake 3D by feeding slightly different images to each eye. It adds gesture controls for 3D models and snap-on pads that make a fresh control interface appear on the display, because touching a screen normally is clearly far too straightforward.
