Lenovo Phab Plus, Vibe S1 hands-on: Lenovo at IFA 2015

Lenovo Smart Cast hands-on

Our bloodlust for ever-bigger touchscreens has hit the physical limit – you can get a phone as large as you can possibly hold, telephony-enabled tablets even. How do you put an even bigger screen?

Lenovo Smart Cast

The Lenovo Smart Cast is the answer to that – stick a pico-projector inside. It can project the screen image on the table and even accept touch input. There's your bigger touchscreen. By the way, this trick is pulled off with an infrared motion detector that sits next to the projector.

Lenovo Smart Cast

The projector can also be used to watch a movie or do a presentation – a special rotating prism is put on top of the phone that can project light upwards (phone laying on the table, projecting on the wall) or forwards (phone held upright by its kickstand, projecting on the table).

Lenovo Smart Cast

Unfortunately, the Lenovo Smart Cast is just a prototype for now, but we walked away from the presentation feeling like we glimpsed the future – touchscreens can grow well beyond the physical dimensions of the phone. Even bendy, foldable screens will struggle with that. Roll-up screens may pull it off though.

Lenovo Magic View hands-on

Here's another futuristic piece of tech from Lenovo. The Magic View goes the other way – making screens smaller. It repurposes the display unit from a smart glasses prototype to give you a display you can view privately even in public.

Unfortunately, the way this works by putting up the watch up to your eye (think how close smart glasses have to be to your eyes, yes that close). The secondary display makes the watch chunkier on the hand too.

Lenovo Magic View

The watch itself is a lot like the Moto 360, flat tire display and all. Again, it's a prototype so it may be quite a while before this hits stores (and perhaps it never will). We can see the Smart Cast being used, the Lenovo Magic View watch feels too awkward to use though.

Lenovo Magic View