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Today at Lenovo Tech World \u201823, many things happened. There was a lot of talk about AI. Nvidia\u2019s Jensen Huang and his leather jacket were there. There were some celebrities I was probably supposed to recognize. And Lenovo dusted off its bendable phone concept and let it out into the light for nearly two full minutes!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
This version does seem more advanced than the one we saw seven years ago! We only saw that one go into snap-bracelet mode (with a frankly upsetting crunching noise<\/a>), while the 2023 model can do a couple more poses, from the happy worm to a tented mode \u2014 which, if we\u2019re feeling less generous, is really just an incomplete cuff mode.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Motorola\u2019s new prototype has a friendly orange fabric backing. When Valasek snapped it onto her wrist, she did so over what looked like a watch but seems to be a blank metal square held on with a watchband. It might be magnetic and seems to be there to prevent the phone cuff from flying off your wrist every time you move your arm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I also didn\u2019t hear a crunch this time, which is reassuring.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Valasek spent about a minute of the two-hour event talking about the concept and another minute or two using it to demonstrate some on-device wallpaper-generation feature and then walked off. That\u2019s almost double the screen time the last version got in 2016.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Is the bendy phone going to happen? Probably not like this! A minute feels like the sweet spot right before \u201cOh, that\u2019s cool\u201d wears off and people start asking questions like \u201cWhat happens if I rest my wrist on a table?\u201d or \u201cWhat happens if I move my arm too fast?\u201d or \u201cHow would I take a call?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But it\u2019s still nice to see a remnant of that ol\u2019 Moto spirit, and you can draw a pretty straight line between the folding tablet concept<\/a> in Meghan McCarthy\u2019s other hand in the video from 2016 to the Moto Razr Plus<\/a>, a real phone you can buy today. That video, incidentally, is full of gems, from the reveal of the one and only Google Tango device<\/a> to a lengthy discussion of Moto Mods<\/a> \u2014 may they rest in peace.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n