Lenovo's potential pocket PC: photos!

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches Lenovo's "leak" of Project Yoga: a tiny "concept" portable PC that "fits" in a back pocket. Not to mention how the demise of newspapers started, in 1981...

Jeff Bertolucci is excited:

Lenovo has decided to unveil photos of its Pocket Yoga concept PC, an ultra-compact portable that's slim enough to slide in a back pocket. The leather-bound device, which resembles an oversized wallet, features a QWERTY keyboard and a touch screen.

Pocket Yoga does double duty as a conventional netbook-albeit one with a screen that's awfully tiny for conventional, office-style apps-or as a handheld device. A 360-degree hinge allows the display to fold all the way around to the base, thereby allowing the Pocket Yoga to function as a tablet notebook ... It's unclear when or if the Pocket Yoga as seen in these photos will ever ship.

Mike Elgan calls it, "stunning":

Pocket Yoga, has been lighting up Twitter and the blogs this morning. Unfortunately, the so-called product is nothing more than a ... concept device ... Too bad. This netbook looks almost perfect. It's a clamshell, covered in leather, that has a very wide but very shallow keyboard, and wide-and-shallow screen to go with it.

Obviously, the netbook falls into the same general category as Sony's real, shipping netbook, the Sony Vaio P. But unlike the Vaio P, Lenovo's Pocket Yoga would have a pen-based tablet interface. The screen would flip all the way around to the back ... If they could build it, do it right and make it reasonable affordable, they'd have a runaway hit on their hands.

James Sherwood:

Lenovo has claimed it designed its machine long before the Vaio P was introduced.
...
Lenovo said its Yoga netbook experiment is now finished, which could either mean that plans to produce it have been canned or, conversely, that all the ground work’s completed and that a launch isn’t far off. We’re hoping for the latter.

James "jk" Kendrick recalls:

Lenovo had a press release in 2005 that mentioned a concept PC called the Yoga.

Sure enough, there was a Yoga Tablet PC with a wireless keyboard that we mentioned back then. The photo of that Yoga system is very cool but definitely much different than this new Yoga. Those Lenovo folks sure push the envelope with these concept PCs. I hope this latest one becomes a reality.

Jane McEntegart 'splains:

The full Yoga concept was a folding notebook with a detachable keyboard. The system unit was covered in leather ... Pocket Yoga is shaped just like a large wallet, that fits easily into your pocket.

But Matt Faulkner counsels caution:

Just remember to take it out before you sit down.

And finally...

• Richard Halloran; Owns Home Computer (in 1981)
  [As Bill Corbett so eloquently puts it, "Thank goodness we’ll never look antiquated in any way to people 28+ years from now"]

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Cisco wants to own it all?
• Web is 20 today; anyone for cake?
• BBC breaks botnet Act, accusers accuse
• ...more

Buffer overflow:

• Johannes Ullrich: New rogue-DHCP server malware
• Sam Dean: Novell/IDC Survey Reports Interest in Linux Interoperability, Virtualization
• Joe Wilcox: Operating Systems Don't Matter
• Andrew Clifford: Blingware
• David Marshall: Symantec ManageFusion 2009 and what made it successful
• Stephen Wildstrom: Intel & AMD: Things Get Uglier
• Official Google Blog: Make sense of your site: tips for webpage design

Other Computerworld bloggers:

• Michael Horowitz: Can we trust Google?
• Preston Gralla: Why Microsoft won't abandon Internet Explorer
• Eric Lundquist: Final Grades on Cisco's virtualization press conference
• Ken Gagne: MIT's vision of 2019 doesn't account for the Wii
• Robert L. Mitchell: The Quicken decision
• Seth Weintraub: Apple iPhone 3.0 event tomorrow might reveal a tablet
• Mark Everett Hall: Make mashups secure
• Shark Tank: Safety first
• Shark Bait: Spell it out
• ...more

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.