Month: January 2023

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  You've seen the ThinkPad, now there's a ThinkPhone!

You've heard of the ThinkPad—the legendary laptop brand known for durability, aggressively utilitarian business design, and bright-red pointing sticks—now get ready for the Lenovo Think...Phone? The ThinkPhone. A phone supposedly for business use.

ThinkPad was originally an IBM laptop brand before it was bought by Lenovo, and Lenovo also owns Motorola, which it uses to regularly pump out a lot of unexciting mid-range smartphones. It looks like no one was quite sure of how to brand this, and officially, they settled on the awkward "Lenovo ThinkPhone by Motorola." That's fitting, though, since there is a lot of Motorola DNA in this phone—it looks like a generic Motorola phone from the front, and the back is woven Kevlar with a ThinkPad-style "ThinkPhone" logo, complete with a red dot over the "i."

And speaking of design trademarks, while there's no need for a pointing stick here, there is a "Red Key" side button, which does its best to emulate the look of a TrackPoint nubbin. This isn't the power button, but it is a customizable button you can program to launch an app or some other feature.

Enlarge / Symptoms of long COVID-19 include fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive issues. (credit: Getty Images / ArtistGNDphotography)

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea

Even mild COVID-19 cases can have major and long-lasting effects on people’s health. That is one of the key findings from our recent multicountry study on long COVID-19–or long COVID–recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Long COVID is defined as the continuation or development of symptoms three months after the initial infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These symptoms last for at least two months after onset with no other explanation.