Lenovo’s latest product launch caters to office workers who need to stay productive while working remotely. The company’s new ThinkSmart accessories include a soundbar and a webcam, each aimed at making collaboration and communication easier. They arrive at an important time as videoconferencing software like Microsoft Teams and Zoom have largely replaced in-person meetings for much of the world.
Interestingly, they are not necessarily intended for a home user. Instead, Lenovo is positioning its ThinkSmart wares for small huddle rooms and larger conference rooms. They’re actually designed to work with the ThinkSmart Edition Tiny, a small form factor PC that’s made for conference rooms.
Still, when your organization is ready to resume in-office meetings, collaborating with remote teams should be easier, as the Cam and Bar will bring elevated camera, sound, and microphone quality to your video calls.
The ThinkSmart Bar is actually a two-part solution. The larger piece is the soundbar, which brings better audio fidelity with a built-in four-speaker array. A smaller circular puck that adds four beamforming microphones can be placed on a table to capture voices clearly, regardless of where the speaker is positioned.
This solution is certified to work with both Microsoft Teams and Zoom platforms, Lenovo stated.
And for a complete webconferencing experience, you can pair the ThinkSmart Bar with Lenovo’s ThinkSmart Cam, a web camera that is designed for collaboration software. This smart webcam can be clipped to displays or on top of whiteboards and features a wide 100-degree horizontal field of view.
Smart features like auto-framing, auto-zoom, and whiteboard awareness make it adept for scaling up to larger conference rooms once in-person meetings resume again. Resolution is capped at 4K at 30 fps (frames per second), though you can scale down to 1080p at 60 FPS.
Both the Bar and the Cam can be paired with either a ThinkSmart Edition Tiny small form factor PC for conference rooms or a ThinkSmart Hub.
If you’re in a conference room, the new ThinkSmart Edition Tiny acts as a hub for collaboration, allowing multiple presenters to simultaneously connect wirelessly using a wide range of devices, from smartphones to laptops.
The ThinkSmart Edition Tiny is a diminutive small form factor (SFF) desktop that comes preloaded with Intel Unite software. This makes the PC a conference room tool, rather than a desktop PC, and its small size means it can be placed almost anywhere.
Powering this small form factor desktop is Intel’s Core i5 vPro processor, equipped with 256GB of storage. This diminutive desktop weighs just under three pounds and measures 179 x 36.5 x 182.9mm. And for sensitive work communications, Lenovo’s ThinkShield adds end-to-end security.
Lenovo will release more details about pricing closer to when these products ship in January.
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