Lenovo always goes big at CES, but this year, it had a ton of announcements, ranging from its Legion gaming laptops, to its Yoga consumer PCs, to its experimental ThinkBooks. And since it always breaks out some unique devices at CES, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid stood out.

Basically, it's a Windows laptop and an Android tablet in one, but it's also more than that. They're actually two separate devices working together, as opposed to one device that's using both operating systems.

But first, it's time for a quick walk down Memory Lane. The announcement reminded me of a device I used to have called the Teclast X98 Air, an iPad clone that dual-booted Windows 8.1 and Android. Indeed, back in those days (a good decade ago), that exact type of device was fairly common among Chinese OEMs. They were cheap, and they were surprisingly good for the price.

I got to check out the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid at CES, and unlike my old X98 Air, this isn't dual-booting anything.

Two devices acting as one

The display comes right off of the laptop. You just have to give it a pull. What's interesting is that once you do that, both devices continue to work. This isn't like a Surface Book, where the display comes off but the base is useless until the screen is connected again.

The tablet has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, while the laptop has an Intel Core Ultra 7. You can continue to use the tablet while it's disconnected, or you can connect the base to an external display and use it as a Windows PC. This means that while the display is connected, it's really just mirroring what the base is saying to do.

Alternatively, there's a button that you can press on the keyboard to turn the PC into an Android laptop while it's still attached. This can be pretty useful, since you might want to be able to use a keyboard with the Android tablet from time to time. Remember, these two computers don't talk to each other, so it's not like they'll be sharing a file system or anything.

It's still not practical

Lenovo's ThinkBook brand, which was introduced as an SMB-inspired laptop brand, seems to be about experimental concepts these days. The first two generations of the ThinkBook Plus had an E Ink touchscreen on the lid, and the third generation put a secondary display next to the keyboard.

You will be able to buy the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid for $1,999 though, and that's really a pretty good price, considering that you get both a laptop and a tablet. Still, it just doesn't feel practical to me.

For one thing, we have Android apps on Windows now. I often use Android apps on the Surface Pro 9 with 5G for everything I would use a tablet for. Before you say it, yes, having a full suite of Google apps, including the Google Play Store, is a way better experience.

But it's cool

In typical CES fashion, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid is definitely cool. It's not the only cool product that the firm had either. It showed off the ThinkBook 13x SPE, a laptop that has an E Ink Prism display built into the lid.

We've seen E Ink screens on lids of a few generations of the ThinkBook Plus, but this is pretty different. For one thing, those were touchscreens. The E Ink Prism display in the lid of the ThinkBook 13x SPE isn't functional at all. It's purely decorative. You can display different images or animations on it, so the laptop can always have a different look.

And then there's the Magic Bay that's on a couple of different ThinkBooks like the 16P. Lenovo rolled out some concepts for different modular attachments, which magnetically attach. One of them was a little screen that would just show smiley face emojis, which was my personal favorite. Seriously, I need that kind of positive feedback throughout my day.

Another was a fan, and Lenovo even had one that served as a secondary display. The second screen was really awkward though. It was too heavy for the laptop hinge to support it.

The ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid is an old dream realized

Despite all of the cool stuff that Lenovo had on hand at CES, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid was definitely the coolest. It also just reminds me of when gadgets were a lot more fun, another reason that I started off this article with a callback to a cheap iPad clone that dual-booted Android and Windows.

I've been looking for that one device that's good at everything for ages, and back in the early 2010s when Microsoft was trying and failing to make Windows good on tablets, there was this dream of having a device that ran Windows when using it as a laptop, and ran Android when using it as a tablet.

That dream is realized with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid, and for that reason alone, it's pretty cool. It's not 2014 anymore, of course, so it's not practical. But to have the seamless experience of being a really good laptop with an Android tablet that pops off, that's awesome.