Month: September 2016

Enlarge / From top to bottom, the Elite Slice main unit, the optical drive, audio module, and VESA mounting plate. (credit: HP)

HP has announced today two new desktop PCs both with some unusual form factors in what it calls the "desktop reinvention." While laptops and all-in-ones have a long history of novel designs and advanced engineering, the traditional desktop has tended to be a rather less exciting category. Some systems have shrunk, to take advantage of the increasing integration and decreasing power requirements that modern processors boast, but the plain old mini-tower PC, still a corporate staple, has had little thought or attention given to its design over the years.

The HP Elite Slice is a corporate oriented machine designed to be modular, taking advantage of USB Type-C for power and I/O. The base unit houses the actual PC in a unit measuring 6.5 inches square, and 1.4 inches tall. This houses all the major PC components—processor up to a 35W Core i7-6700T, RAM up to 32GB, storage up to 512GB NVMe, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac Wi-Fi—and a handful of ports. There's a USB Type-C for power, a second USB Type-C that also supports DisplayPort alternate modes, two USB Type-A, one DisplayPort, and one HDMI. Optionally, the side of the unit can sport a fingerprint reader.

The top cover of the main unit is modular, though not end-user changeable. As well as a plain cover, the main unit can have a wireless charging cover, so you can recharge your phone just by setting it on top of your PC, or what HP calls the "collaboration cover," which contains a set of buttons (start/end call, volume up/down, and so on) for controlling a software phone such as Skype for Business.

Enlarge

Microsoft's Courier was supposed to be an electronic journal or diary, a piece of hardware purpose-built for applications like OneNote. Two screens with a hinge between them, it opened and closed like a book, supporting both touch and stylus input on both its screens. Lenovo's new Yoga Book looks like a riff on the Courier combined with the company's successful range of 360 degree hinge Yoga-branded laptops.

Like a Yoga machine, it's a more or less clamshell form factor that can be opened right up to turn it into a tablet of sorts. Like Courier, it's got book-like styling with both halves approximately the same size for a symmetrical look. And like the Courier, it's designed for mixed touch and pen input. But it has a twist. A normal laptop has a screen and a keyboard. Courier has a screen and another screen. The Yoga Book does neither of these things; it has a conventional touch screen paired with a special touch input surface designed for a stylus, dubbed the Create Pad.

Using the Real Pen to paint. (credit: Lenovo)

Press a button and the Create Pad turns into a backlit keyboard using haptic feedback to simulate the feedback you'd get from a regular keyboard. In this mode, it has shades of Microsoft's Touch Covers, but the Yoga Book's concept is more versatile—the touch surface isn't just a keyboard—and probably more comfortable, thanks to that feedback. The removal of the physical keys makes this half of the Yoga Book thinner; it also makes it into a drawing surface. Hide the virtual keys and it becomes a stylus workspace for the Yoga Book's battery-free Real Pen, with 2,048 pressure levels and angle detection. Clip a piece of paper to the Create Pad and put some ink into the Real Pen and you can draw with, well, a real pen and real ink, while everything you do gets immediately digitized by the device.