Walking into a Lenovo showroom can sometimes feel like I accidentally stepped into a taping of the 1990s sitcom Family Matters. I’m there to see the standard, Carl Winslow-level laptops, the tried and true dependable designs. Then steps in Steve Urkel. Behind his technicolor suspenders, he’s holding a giant metal monstrosity he’s calling a head-tracking laptop stand along with a notebook that flips from landscape to portrait. “Did I do that?” the Urkel side of Lenovo says, snickering from the corner.
Yes, that is indeed a thing Lenovo is working on. The laptop maker’s wacky world of concept devices, announced at IFA 2025, now includes the Smart Motion Concept, a large metal stand that uses your notebook’s built-in camera and microphone and head-tracking software to keep the computer trained on your eyes at all times. The laptop screen can follow you if you’re rolling to the side or even trying to duck under your desk, as if the boss on your Zoom call needed to loom over you even more than usual. The head tracking can be finicky. Moving your facade so far out of the camera’s range can leave the device guessing where you are. What may make it extra perfunctory is a common problem with head-tracking software. Having two heads in-frame can leave it additionally confused.
© Kyle Barr / GizmodoThe Lenovo Smart Motion Concept is a heavy device that will want to stay rooted to your desktop setup. For that purpose, it’s built with extra fans inside to try and keep your mobile workstation extra cool. It’s currently only big enough to support relatively thin laptops, so you won’t want to stick your massive 18-inch gaming laptop upon the stand and hope the motors don’t give out. There’s an additional “AI ring” that allows for gesture controls to manually move the stand. While the contraption seems designed first for people who just can’t sit still at their desk, there may be other accessibility use cases for people in chairs that are too low for their desks.
Not weird enough? How about a laptop that swivels from horizontal to vertical
© Kyle Barr / GizmodoLenovo’s other major proof of concept is its ThinkBook VertiFlex Concept, a 14-inch laptop with a screen that can rotate vertically on a hinge. The actual mechanism inside the laptop is complex. The laptop lid supports a joint that can rotate around two points, allowing the screen to lift up and settle into position with a single hand. This turns your average 14-inch horizontal display into a vertical screen, handy for people who code or prefer to read more than one paragraph at a time on an ad-filled webpage.
Lenovo also showed off how the extra room allows you space to stick a phone in case you wanted to use Lenovo Smart Connect to transfer files or mirror your phone. The only things missing are a stand for the phone and perhaps a pull-out tab to make grabbing and turning the screen a little easier. Otherwise, it seems to be one of the more useful concepts Lenovo has crafted in recent years. The last time Lenovo showed us its concepts, it actually brought one to life in the form of the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable with its 14-inch screen that extends vertically to 16.7 inches with the press of a button.
If you were thinking of some devices you could stick up on the Smart Motion, you could look at Lenovo’s upcoming slate of business-end laptops like the new ThinkPad P16 Gen 3. It’s a workstation complete with an Intel Core Ultra 200 HX and one of the Nvidia RTX Pro series GPUs. This is the kind of high-end business device that can get up to 128GB of RAM, which all combined may make good use of its 3.2K OLED touch display. It’s one of those business-end devices that somehow makes other high-end devices, even gamer laptops, seem blasé despite the high starting price of $3,400. It’s certainly a more no-frills, Winslow-esque device.
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