CES is often an opportunity to present strange products and accessories and from this point of view, Lenovo has done very well. The Chinese manufacturer has, in fact, unveiled crank devices.
Want to save a little energy and money? Then Lenovo’s new accessory kit may be for you. The manufacturer arrived at CES 2024 with a keyboard and mouse that want to save the world from ecological disaster thanks to the power of your fingers. Soberly named “Mechanical Energy Harvesting Solution» (or “Solution for kinetic energy recovery” in plain French), these two devices recharge with a manual dynamo mechanism.
Five minutes of exercise for half an hour of autonomy
The (mechanical) keyboard has a toothed wheel that must be rotated to power the battery. A bit like a fidget spinner, you will need to spin the wheel for 5 long minutes to recover enough energy for around half an hour of typing. If the idea is not stupid, the energy efficiency does not really seem worth it. Unless you’re completely out of energy, straining your finger for 5 minutes to type an email and two tweets seems slightly excessive.
Fortunately, the keyboard also has a mini solar panel which should help harvest energy as well as a USB port if you have the luxury of having real power on hand. The accessory can work via Bluetooth, via a dongle or wired.
Little tricks, little tricks, always little tricks
The mouse has a ring on its underside. To power the accessory, you must remove the crank from its location, turn it on itself for a minute and you should recover enough kinetic energy to use your pointer for half an hour. The performance is more interesting than on the keyboard, but we would have liked to be able to use the scroll wheel to reload the mouse rather than having to turn it over each time.
The mouse still has 8 buttons, a toggle mechanism for connectivity (between wired, Bluetooth and use with dongle) and a USB-C port if you don’t have the courage to recharge your accessory by hand.
These two products are still prototypes and it is not possible to find them in stores at the moment. If the idea of using kinetic energy is not bad, the performance is not yet interesting enough to make them really useful accessories. Let’s hope that before possible marketing, Lenovo makes efforts on this point. In any case, it is pleasant to see that CES still gives pride of place to unusual and intriguing experiments.
Source : PCMag
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