Lenovo has a new giant tablet that it wants families to gather around on game night
The Lenovo Home 500, with a price tag of $1549, is your pretty standard PC, at first blush.
But plug in a mouse and keyboard, or connect Bluetooth versions of the same, and it's a fully-functional Windows 10 PC. It was officially announced at a special event in San Francisco.
All of the computing guts are contained in that massive screen, right next to a battery with a promised 3 hours of computing life.
But if you take it off the kickstand, it becomes an endtable-sized tablet.
Lenovo says that it's perfect for getting the whole family around for game time, collaborative research, or whatever else.
Lenovo has its own app store, called "Aura," that it says is full of apps that are made for two people to use the tablet together. It also comes with a custom menu interface system on top of Windows 10 to make it easier to launch those Aura apps.
But in my brief tests, the touchscreen wasn't quick or responsive enough to keep up with an impromptu game of air hockey on the Lenovo Home 500.
And it's a neat novelty, but how many really compelling games are going to come out for a huge device with such limited appeal? Probably not many.
This is actually the second time Lenovo has tried the concept: 2013's Lenovo Horizon had a similar concept, but failed to set the world on fire. Apparently, it did well enough that it felt justified in releasing the Horizon 2.
It's weird, no doubt about it. Which is why Lenovo's official marketing slogan for the Home 500 - and the Yoga 300 superlight laptop/tablet convertible also announced today - is "Good Weird."