Lenovo launches a trio of quirky devices at MWC 2015

Chinese technology giant Lenovo has launched a slew of new devices at Mobile World Congress, currently underway in Barcelona. While all are signals that the company is on a mission to own the mobile market in the same way as it has the PC space, it launched three devices today which are particularly attention grabbing.

Lenovo kicked things off at MWC in fairly sedate fashion — day one saw it launch two Android tablets, the TAB 2 A8 and A10-70, and a Windows tablet, the ideapad MIIX 300. While they all seem to be improvements on its previous tablet offerings, none are really what you’d call headline-grabbing (although the Dolby Surround Sound on the A10-70 should come as wlecome news to media junkies).

That descriptor would instead have to wait until day two, when it launched a smartphone/camera hybrid, a pocket projector and a phone which it says allows you to hear audio from all directions.

Here’s the rundown on all three.

VIBE Shot: a smartphone/camera hybrid that doesn’t look ridiculous

While blending smartphones and cameras is hardly a new concept — Samsung’s been doing it with its Galaxy Zoom series for years now — the genre has always felt like a work in progress. The VIBE Shot, pictured at the top of this article, seems somewhat more complete. And by that, mean it doesn’t look like someone welded the lens from a happy snapper onto a smartphone.

The 16-megapixel rear camera features a six-piece modular lens and a full-frame 16:9 low-light sensor for shooting images in dark interiors or at night.

Lenovo claims that the camera’s tricolor flash, photo luminosity adjusts automatically based on the ambient light conditions, and optical image stabilization reduces blur and keeps photos sharp.

On the phone front, the aluminium VIBE Shot ships with Android 5.0 Lollipop on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 32 GB of storage and a microSD option to store an additional 128 GB. There’s also an 8MP front camera for all the selfie addicts.

A7000: a smartphone for…your ears man

The A7000 seems like a pretty decent smartphone: it comes Android 5.0 on a MediaTek True8Core processor with 4G LTE, has a dual SIM card slot and is 7.9mm thin and weighs in at around 140 grams. The feature Lenovo’s selling it on though is the Dolby Atmos technology.

According to the Chinese tech giant:

Users will immediately hear the Dolby Atmos difference using headphones: sounds of people, places, things, and music become more vivid and move from all directions, including overhead, with astonishing clarity, richness and depth. Voices and noises have a broader range from highs to lows, with the greatest subtlety. The technology also makes playback volume more consistent across all types of content.

Sounds, um, trippy.

Lenovo Pocket Projector

Lenovo’s got a bit of thing for projectors at the moment. Last year, it launched the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro, which comes with its own projector and now it looks like it’ll be selling a peripheral projector for anyone who decided not to buy that particular product.

The 50-lumen projector supports the most common multimedia file formats and offers up to 32 GB of microSD storage to support large digital libraries. Lenovo claims it’s easy to set up with any compatible Android device, as well as DLNA-enabled Android, Windows 8.1 and iOS devices.