Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus has an E Ink touchscreen built into the lid

While most laptop manufacturers race to produce the perfect balance between power, price, and portability, there’s still plenty of room to explore more novel concepts in case any of them happen to stick.

Aimed squarely at the multitasking market, Lenovo’s ThinkBook Plus announced at CES 2020 incorporates an E Ink display in the lid of the laptop, allowing you to view essential notifications, read ebooks or PDFs, and take notes or sketch with a stylus while your laptop is closed.

If this at all sounds familiar, then it's likely because you've seen the Lenovo Yoga Book C930, which replaced the keyboard section with an E Ink display, similarly doubling as an e-reader or sketchpad when not used for typing.

• Lenovo unveils the world’s first 5G PC at CES 2020
• Lenovo jumps into eGPU fray with new Legion BoostStation enclosure
• We finally know how much the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold will cost

Image 1 of 3

The external E Ink display on the ThinkBook Plus is 10.8-inches and, as is the case with all such displays, monochromatic. Lenovo is including its Precision Pen with the ThinkBook Plus, and it appears that the stylus will be able to attach to the side of the laptop when not in use.

As for the laptop itself, it’s sporting a 13.3-inch FHD IPS display where you’d typically expect the screen to be, and while other specific specs are a little light on the ground, we do know it’ll be powered by 10th-gen Intel Core CPUs and utilise SSDs for storage.

• Best Lenovo laptops of 2020

Some other business-centric and privacy-minded features include a fingerprint scanner, webcam shutter, Skype hotkeys, Amazon Alexa integration and the ability to sync E Ink note-taking with Microsoft OneNote.

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus will be available in the US in March starting at $1,199 (about £910 / AU$1,729) with other regions’ pricing and availability yet to be announced.

• Check out all of TechRadar's CES 2020 coverage. We're live in Las Vegas to bring you all the breaking tech news and launches, plus hands-on reviews of everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops and smart home gadgets.