The Consumer Electronic Show is upon us and Intel doesn’t expect it to be a one-off. The chip giant has brought its own folding PC concept called the HorseShoe Bend. The company has a view toward providing inspiration for an entirely new category of devices.
The Horseshoe Bend is a concept device and has an OLED display and measures 4:3 and 17.3 inches diagonal when unfolded, which means it feels much closer to a traditional laptop size when you fold it at an angle and use it on a desk. There’s also a Surface-style kickstand so you can make use of the full display size when paired with a wireless keyboard.
The most common mode of operation is likely to be somewhat like a laptop where content and UI exists under your fingers as well as in front of your face. Webpages feel like they scroll on forever; you can continue reading an article just by moving your hand away.
Another use case for the HorseShoe Bend is that you can do video editing where you can manipulate the timeline directly where the keyboard would normally be. If you want to play a video full-screen, you can just turn the display around and use the kickstand. If the on-screen keyboard doesn’t do it for you, you can attach a wireless one to the bottom half of the display.
Horseshoe Bend is built around Intel’s new 10nm Tiger Lake architecture, which is set to ship in laptops later this year. It allows for a 7mm-thick chassis with a 9W TDP and without any active cooling. The device we saw was running regular Windows 10, but Intel expects Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 10X to be a good fit for the category later on.
Horseshoe Bend obviously doesn’t have the fit and finish of a shipping device, but with its thinner bezels and slimmer profile, in some ways, it does feel sleeker. Of course, there’s also something to be said for putting a much bigger slice of OLED in front of you.
Intel really does seem to be pushing this form factor of the Horseshoe Bend, and it expects to be working with several manufacturers to help develop these devices in the not-too-distant future.
