Lenovo Reveal Footwear, Watches + New Search App As Consumer PC Share Starts To Slide

The big Chinese Company who were given $10M to launch into the Australian PC consumer market and Exchange protection of $0.92 is set to roll out several new products in coming months along with a new logo.

Unveiled at Lenovo’s TechWorld technology innovation event in Beijing, ReachIt gives Cortana Microsoft’s personal digital assistant a much larger inventory of information to search – including Google Drive, Dropbox and Box as well as Microsoft OneDrive and any connected Lenovo Windows 10 devices.

ReachIt also offers users a more “natural” way to search for their content, according to Lenovo whose share of the Australian consumer PC market has fallen from 10% to 9.2% this month according to the latest GFK data. 


Rather than having to remember the name of a photo, video, document or email, users just need to know the location where they edited it or the date of another relevant piece of information.


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Lenovo demonstrated how users could find a piece of content using voice commands such as “Find the pictures I took from the museum in April,” or “Where the presentation is I was working on at Starbucks last week?”

Maybe Lenovo need to ask their devices how they can get to #1 in the Australian PC market. 

“We are living in a world where technology has made it easy to amass unprecedented amounts of personal digital content. So much information that it can be extremely difficult to remember where it is stored,” said Martin Cohen, vice president of ecosystem and cloud services at Lenovo.

“What you need is an assistant – a friend – who is always at the ready to help. That is where Cortana and Reachit come in, enabling people to find their content in an incredibly natural way – by asking a friend for help.”


Lenovo has also offered a sneak peek at some of its upcoming research projects at its TechWorld event in Beijing today, including a dual-screen smartwatch, a smartphone with a laser projector and gesture control, and pair of ‘smart shoes’.

The company’s ‘Magic View’ smartwatch concept claims to be the first with two screens. The second screen is a virtual interactive display, which uses optical reflection to create a virtual image that Lenovo claims is 20 times larger than the watch face display.


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The user can view the image by peering through a viewfinder below the main watch face – a bit like a periscope. As they turn from side to side the image shifts accordingly, creating a 3D effect.


“This is the first step in the journey to transform wearables, starting with smartwatches, by dealing with that major pain point – screen size,” said Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo. “The second screen brings virtual reality to the world of smartwatches.”

Lenovo claims that this creates a more immersive experience for users, allowing them to follow a map, view photos or even watch a video with much larger visuals than the smartwatches of today can provide.

The dual screen has been designed to be more immersive than regular single-screened smartwatches.


Lenovo also unveiled a new concept smartphone called Smart Cast, which features a built-in laser projector and an infrared motion detector, allowing users to project a large virtual touchscreen onto a table to type with a virtual keyboard.


At TechWorld, pianist Lang Lang helped demonstrate the possibilities of Smart Cast with a rendition of The Entertainer played on the virtual keyboard with the full size sheet music displayed from the smartphone’s projector.


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Lenovo’s smart shoes track and analyse health and fitness data alongside displaying the wearer’s mood through a screen
The smart shoes concept is part of Lenovo’s ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) strategy, which also includes the formation in 2014 of ShenQi – a separate company focused specifically on developing IoT products for the smart home.

ShenQi highlighted several new devices at Lenovo TechWorld, including new super-slim power banks, 3D printers that can print food and high-precision objects, the smallest dual-track outdoor sound box, and a smart home control centre based on Wi-Fi.