“Hey Ari, could you review Lenovo’s Table PC?”
“Sure. What’s a Table PC?”
The Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon is a Table PC, so let’s start there. The IdeaCentre Horizon combines aspects of PCs, laptops, and tablets to create an interesting fusion experience. Lenovo hopes to bring the best of all three worlds into one tidy package. Will they succeed? Read on.
First Impressions
Unboxing the Horizon starts off like your typical boxed up all-in-one PC. The stand for the Horizon is built in to the device itself and is on a bit of a spring-loaded pivot. The bezel of the Horizon is matte rubber and textured to make it more easily portable. Also included is a wireless keyboard and mouse, a microfiber cloth, the power cord, two air hockey paddles, adhesive joysticks, and a wireless six-sided die. More about those later.
The review unit of the Horizon that I used has an Intel Core i7-3537U 2.0 Ghz processor (an i5 at 1.8 GHz is also available, (8 GB of RAM, and Intel HD 4000 graphics and NVDIA GeForce GT620M 2GB graphics. The Horizon has plenty of storage under the hood, with a 1 TB SATA hard drive.
The Software
About those last three accessories: the Horizon plays on its touchscreen capabilities and portability to create a unique multimedia and gaming experience. The Horizon can be used as an ordinary all-in-one PC, running Windows 8. Push the Horizon down to a horizontal position, and it activates Aura, a program designed for touchscreen use, along with the accessories listed above. Aura can be viewed from any angle, allowing a group of people to sit around the Horizon. You can use Aura as a straight multimedia viewer and can pass photos, video clips, or audio tracks across the tabletop to your friends. Attach the various accessories, and you can play any of the included suite of games that come with the machine. The air hockey paddles, obviously enough, can be used for air hockey. The joysticks attach to program-specific points on the screen, and can be used to control your character in various games. The die can be used to play Monopoly and other Lenovo-created games. If Lenovo ever makes a 20-sided die and partner up with Wizards of the Coast, it could make a killer Dungeons and Dragons game. As much fun as the included games are, Lenovo needs to get some serious buy-in from games companies if it wants Aura and the accessories included to be more than a clever gimmick.
Also included are several educational and drawing games for kids. While my toddler is too young for most of the educational programs, she absolutely loves the drawing apps.
Suitable for refrigerators anywhere.
To play off of the tablet aspect, the Horizon uses Blue Stacks to allow you to run Android apps directly on the device. While this is a great idea for folks who own Android devices, I find that the apps don’t always scale up well to the Horizon’s 27 inch screen. This isn’t Lenovo’s fault, but it does detract from the experience.
Performance
I ran NovaBench three times to try and get a decent baseline and had scores ranging from 570 to 601. Is the Horizon the fastest thing out there? No. Does it get the job done? Yes.
The Horizon draws on its laptop ancestry with an internal battery, making it easy to move from desktop mode in the office to Aura tabletop mode in the living room with ease. That said, the battery life isn’t the best. To test the battery, I charged it to full capacity, unplugged it, turned on WiFi and Bluetooth, and ran my favorite superhero action movie, The Avengers. I made it all the way to Iron Man chasing down the nuclear missile prior to taking it through the wormhole before the battery ran down, meaning that it lasted two hours, five minutes, and seven seconds before going dead.
The Strengths
Of all of the touchscreen-enabled devices I’ve used, the Horizon is the only one that I think actually wants me to touch it. From the rubberized bezel, to the light-up LED volume, brightness and screen controls located on the bezel, culminating in the 27-inch multitouch screen itself. Forget a smartphone, phablet or tablet, the Horizon wants you to use both hands and bring your friends.
The included wireless keyboard and mouse don’t feel like a cheap throw-in that Lenovo includes so you can use the Horizon. They’re both sturdy, usable devices in their own right.
The Drawbacks
Unfortunately, the downsides to the Horizon are almost as clear as the high points. The paddles, joysticks, and die are nice, but unless there’s a real market for games that use these peripherals, the accessories don’t rise above the level of a clever gimmick. Aura is a lot of fun for things like showing vacation photos to family and friends and is a convenient way to manage music in a social setting. When it comes to video, you certainly could use Aura the same way you would for photographs and show off videos that you’ve taken yourself. That said, Lenovo pre-loaded the review unit with music videos and clips from various films. While Lenovo probably wouldn’t mind if you ripped your home DVD collection for use on the Horizon, it’s not something that the average user can do with ease.
Additionally, the Horizon only comes with two USB ports. While the fact that both ports are the speedy USB 3.0 is nice, you’re already going to dedicate one port for the wireless keyboard and mouse’s shared dongle. Plug the dongle for the wireless die into the other port, and you’re out of luck when it comes to additional USB peripherals. As I said earlier, I like the included keyboard and mouse. Making them Bluetooth rather than dongle-dependent would improve USB availability immensely.
I’m also having trouble thinking of a target demographic for the Horizon. Hardcore gamers don’t strike me as likely to sit down at the Horizon for a nice game of Monopoly, and folks that play a lot of tabletop games need something more than a wireless die to make them switch from the original to a digital replacement. Would someone who isn’t tech savvy enjoy using Aura to browse photos, music, and videos? Absolutely. Unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy way to take emailed photos and videos and import them into Aura.
Pricing and Availability
The Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon Core i5 version starts at $1,499, and the i7 starts at $1,599. Both can be found at Lenovo’s website or on Amazon.
Wrap Up
As much as I truly enjoyed using the Horizon (most of all, watching my daughter have a blast doodling away on the drawing program), it feels like a work in progress. Improve the battery life and work out deals with a few of the larger game companies, and I’ll happily move the Horizon from my “maybe” list to a “must buy.”
To be honest, I can see two ways where it might be incredibly useful to Roleplay Gamers:
1. Running Maps: with the touch of a screen, you could access multiple saved maps, possibly even zoom in on maps. That could be handy not just for dungeon or maze crawls, but also cities and treks through the countryside/wilderness. Bonus if you can overlay a map with a grid; double bonus if you can input icons representing player and NPC/monster positions that can be moved by touching the screen.
2. Instant access to various downloaded rules manuals, images of monsters or NPC’s, etc.
I *don’t* think most gamers are going to be interested in using the provided die or dice—we tend to collect dice, love our sets, and often have “lucky” dice we like to use (or several sets, which we swap through depending on which dice are rolling hot that night). I know that seems superstitious (and in a way it is)—but there’s also the fact that different rolling surfaces provide different bounces for a die, plus there’s the factor of variations in edging, etc. between dice sets that can affect how a die rolls for a session.
Now, if they *really* want to aim at the tabletop roleplay market, the best thing they can to is to push for 3D holographic projection capability above the screen… along with the potential for movement or even programmed interactions within the image. :D
Imagine, being able to see tiny representations of your characters climbing a mountain… or 3D representations of your characters and the monsters acting out a fight/battle —especially since showing it in 3D offers the option of truly showcasing aerial or underwater fights, or giving a true representation of things like storming a castle!
Plus, there are other tabletop games (for instance, Risk, or Battleship… perhaps even Clue or for the little ones, Chutes n’ Ladders) that could give a truly enhanced gaming experience via 3D interactive imagery.
Aside from aiming at the gaming market, I think they might want to aim for families (not just with kids games, but also for family play time).
Now, a HUGE bonus they could achieve if they create this with 3D imagery is if they could do a contract with sports networks to install cameras for the 3D, and offer real time 3D viewing of televised sports shows… especially if they advance it enough to offer the options of constant distance view, a small side screen that shows the basic flat tv where you can see the announcers, replays, zoom-ins, etc., and the possibility of doing a short zoom-in onto the court/field at a specific spot and replaying the action there, along with a clock that lets you determine how far *back* you want to start the replay.
They’d make billions.