Lenovo has unveiled a new version of its compact Ideacentre home theater PC, and it's a computer with a twist – the twist being an optional projector that beams your movies and TV shows across 110 inches (279 cm) of wall or screen space. Unveiled at CES 2016, the dinky machine goes on sale this June for US$849 and above.
We've seen Ideacentres in various shapes and sizes before, but this is a significant departure in terms of both design and specs from the Ideacentre Q190, the last dedicated home theater PC Lenovo launched. The look is more triangular coffee flask than rectangular paperback book, with the metallic chassis taking up 2.9 liters in total volume.
The detachable projector that sits atop or stands alongside the computer is powered by a Texas Instruments DLP chip and beams video at a 720p resolution. There's a tripod hole underneath, two tiny speakers, a HDMI input and one USB 2.0 port for connecting external peripherals. It won't win any projector contests in terms of specifications but it gives you a novel way of watching videos without spending money on a separate device.
As for the PC itself, it looks like you'll be able to pack some real power into this Windows 10 setup: various configurations will be available, with up to a 6th generation Skylake Intel Core i7 processor and an Nvidia GTX 750 TI 2 GB graphics card available. A maximum of 16 GB of RAM and up to a 2 TB hard drive (128 GB SSD) can be installed too.
Those are some serious internal components and will let you do much more than flick through your music and video libraries. You could put together a serious gaming rig and again the projector can prove useful if you want to cast the action across a blank wall space. As the computer has only just been announced at CES in Las Vegas, those are all the details we have for now, but it's something to look out for in June.
Product page: Lenovo