Should you choose to go for the full Voltron-esque experience, all of these devices can be completely combined into one unified Fujitsu Lifebook. Based on this initial design by Prashant Chandra, the tablet part becomes a touchscreen keyboard, for instance, while the slim digital camera can mount to the lid of the notebook to work like an outward-facing webcam. They all integrate and work together combining their powers.

It could mean that the main Lifebook would have its own processor, which could then be supplemented by the processing power of the tablet and smartphone for even faster performance. All the data gets shared between all the devices, helping reduce the instance of repeated data and components. “For example if I have my songs on my music player, why do I have to block the same amount of storage on my laptop?” Chandra continues, “Similarly, if I have a processor sitting in my tablet, why can it not also run/assist my laptop?”

It is of course a concept, but is this what the future of computing will bring us? Would you want a modular computer like this? I would.

The post Perhaps This Modular Fujitsu Lifebook Concept Isn’t Too Far From Becoming Reality appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

What he has managed to do is reproduce the look and feel of a real arcade cabinet, completly decked out in Street Fighter artwork and giving you that “put the quarter on the ledge to call next” kind of nostalgia. You get a real arcade stick and real arcade buttons.

The kicker is that this whole thing is simply powered by a Lenovo Y560 notebook PC. When you flip up the arcade controls, you reveal the full laptop, which is being docked on a notebook cooler. The cooler blows cool air to the underside of the lappy, keeping it at a reasonable operating temperature. The notebook cooler also happens to have a USB hub.

Nothing too crazy, but that USB hub then connects to the aforementioned arcade controls, as well as an external USB keyboard that is hidden away in a slide-out tray toward the bottom of the cabinet. This way, you can access keyboard functionality without having to access the physical notebook.

Not everyone can put together a dedicated computer for a dedicated MAME arcade cabinet. Liou’s creation, as he describes it, allows users to mix work and play. Do your work on the Y560 as you normally would, then dock it in the arcade cabinet for some crazy hadouken and sonic boom action.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that this is really just a one-off(functional) concept, so there’s no saying whether Lenovo would actually build one of these things for retail.  We’d love to have one setup in the office here for those creative “lunch meetings.”

The post Hands On: Lenovo’s laptop arcade dock money cant buy appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Motorola took a little bit of wind out of its own sails by letting the AT&T event reveal the Motorola Atrix 4G, but the Motorola event a few hours later let you get up close and personal with the hot new smartphone… if you could fight past the nerdgasm to get close enough, that is.

Yes, I fought. It was quite the struggle, but I did manage to get a really good look at the laptop-like dock that you can get for the upcoming smartphone. The matte black finish and super slim profile is reminiscent of that Google Chrome OS netbook going around, but you have to realize that this is just a dock; there are no real guts in this thing. The phone does all the work.

It’s actually pretty cool that the dock doesn’t have its own power button. As soon as you plunk the Atrix 4G into the dock in the back, the dock turns on and launches into a “Webtop” interface with a real Firefox web browser and other utilities. There’s a good size keyboard and trackpad, as well as a 11.6-inch LCD display.

If you take a look at the pictures, the “docking” portion in the back is a reasonable distance away from the “laptop” display, so you can tilt it back a fair amount. You’ll also notice that the dock folds right back into the whole laptop thing, making for a blade-thin portable accessory.

If you want to go even bigger, Motorola was also showing off a multimedia dock that provides a real keyboard and HDMI output to however big a display you desire. The interface is identical to the laptop-like dock with the Webtop thing. You can even multi-task in the “mobile” view on your big screen, showing off the different apps as tabs while simultaneously doing the Webtop thing in another window.

They’re not kidding. The Motorola Atrix 4G is a real game changer. Look for it through AT&T, Bell Canada, and Orange UK in the not-so-distant future.

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