Lenovo carted a smorgasbord of new products to Barcelona this week to show them off during Mobile World Congress 2025, including some promising proof-of-concept devices for PCs.
These goofy gadgets could easily be missed in the cavalcade of tech news coming out of MWC 2025, so I wanted to quickly run down the highlights so you can go about your day with a better sense of where Windows 11 laptops and PCs are headed in the year to come.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, AI is the buzzword du jour at MWC this year, and Lenovo is hopping on the bandwagon with proof-of-concept devices that put AI chips in a monitor and a USB-C power bank so you can add more AI to your PC.
It's a neat idea, but what impresses me more is Lenovo's simple idea for a USB-C power bank that charges via a detachable solar cell. As you'll see below, it has an unfolding solar panel that can be easily mounted or held to charge on the go.
However, note that since these are all proof-of-concept devices, there's no pricing or release date to be announced. Here's what we know so far about all three prototype designs.
Lenovo AI Display with NPU Inside
Perhaps the most intriguing proof-of-concept product that Lenovo brought to MWC 2025 is a display with "AI inside" thanks to a chip with an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) being built into the display.
This is just a proof of concept, so it's not a final product and doesn't have much in the way of obvious utility. However, Lenovo claims that putting a chip in the monitor not only helps it do more as a monitor, it also means that "non-AI PCs will be able to use Large Language Models" because the monitor's processor will somehow help your PC by "receiving commands from the user, analyzing and recognizing the intent, and allowing the [AI] Assistant to execute the request."
On top of that, this proof-of-concept monitor has motors inside that allow it to automatically rise, lower, rotate and tilt to give you the optimal viewing angle.
Lenovo AI Stick
If you'd rather not put AI in your monitor, Lenovo also took a shot at slotting it into a stick you can plug into a PC for extra AI power when you want it.
At MWC 2025, the company also showed off its new Lenovo AI Stick, another proof-of-concept device with an NPU capable of achieving 32 TOPS (trillion operations per second).
The AI Stick is designed to plug into your PC via USB-C to give you access to "Lenovo AI Now functionalities," but it also appears to have a power cable that plugs into a wall socket.
However, what we've heard so far suggests you don't have to plug the AI Stick into a wall socket to use it.
According to Lenovo, the AI Stick "can also be plugged into a wall socket to unleash maximum performance for demanding AI tasks," suggesting external power is optional but required to use this proof-of-concept device to its full potential.
Solar Power Kit for Yoga
Last but not least, Lenovo brought a solar power proof-of-concept kit to MWC 2025 as an example of how you might use solar power to power your laptop on the go in the future.
It's a pretty simple system that effectively gives you a small detachable solar panel you can connect to a bag, tree, backpack or anything in a sunny spot nearby. The Solar Power Kit then generates power from the light of the sun and stores it in a USB-C power bank for later use.
Outlook
Lenovo always brings a slew of new products to MWC, but the proof-of-concept devices are always my favorite because they're the most intriguing.
None of these ideas may end up making it to market in actual products, but they give you a sense of where the company is headed and what the future of computing might look like.
I don't know about you, but personally, I care a lot less about using AI than I do about being able to charge and power my devices using sunlight anywhere I go. That Solar Power Kit has to be the most exciting proof-of-concept device I've seen so far out of MWC 2025, and I can't wait to see how Lenovo applies the idea to future products.
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