Anxiety Into Electricity: Lenovo Keyboard, Mouse at CES 2024 Channel Your Fidgety Fingers

(Credit: PCMag)

LAS VEGAS—Got excess, twitchy energy while you’re kicking around online or pondering spreadsheets? Your PC can harness it. At CES 2024, Lenovo showed off a keyboard and mouse set that lets you spin and wind your way to recharge your peripherals, and save the planet a smidge along the way.

Lenovo dubs its creation its “Mechanical Energy Harvesting Solution.” While the name might suggest that it’s tapping into the velocity of your key typing or mouse-clicking and turning it into charge, it’s not quite like that. We got a demo of the input-device pair at the show, and it’s all about a different type of energy you generate: fidget power!

Start with the keyboard. This is, at first glance, a plain wireless 68-key tenkeyless model, with standard-feeling keys with RGB backlighting. A strip along the top is a solar panel, which can passively recharge the keyboard when it’s under bright light. That’s not new; we’ve seen solar keyboards from Logitech and others in the (distant) past.

What is new, though, is the dial at upper left. At first, it looks like it should be a volume control or some kind of macro scroll wheel. Instead, it just freely spins in place, and your spinning of the wheel is transformed from kinetic energy into battery charge. (The wheel serves no other purpose, alas, but as a charger and an outlet for your fidgety fingers.)

Lenovo says that five minutes of spinning should equate to 30 minutes of charge on the keyboard’s lithium battery. There’s also a USB-C port on the back panel for a manual cable connection, and a three-position switch allows for switching the connection among the provided RF dongle, the wired USB, or Bluetooth.

As for the mouse, you’ve got a handful of shortcut buttons and a sculpted design—and a different kinetic concept. On the underside of the mouse is an embedded ring, which is on a pivot and can be pried up and raised perpendicular to the mouse. You then use the ring as a winding key for the mouse’s battery.

According to the specs, you should get 30 minutes of charge out of a minute of winding.

The mouse itself is software-programable to 12,800dpi and the button mix resembles that of a good productivity mouse, with the usual left/middle (scroll wheel)/right buttons, left and right scroll buttons, a side sniping button, a resolution switcher, two side shortcut buttons, and a toggle switch.

As these are a prototype set of devices (augmented by a solar-chargeable headset, not discussed here), you can’t buy these products quite yet, but we’re looking forward to giving them a test drive if and when they come to market.

About Our Expert

John Burek

Executive Editor and PC Labs Director

My Experience

I have been a technology journalist for almost 30 years and have covered just about every kind of computer gear—from the 386SX to 64-core processors—in my long tenure as an editor, a writer, and an advice columnist. For almost a quarter-century, I worked on the seminal, gigantic Computer Shopper magazine (and later, its digital counterpart), aka the phone book for PC buyers, and the nemesis of every postal delivery person. I was Computer Shopper's editor in chief for its final nine years, after which much of its digital content was folded into PCMag.com. I also served, briefly, as the editor in chief of the well-known hard-core tech site Tom's Hardware.

During that time, I've built and torn down enough desktop PCs to equip a city block's worth of internet cafes. Under race conditions, I've built PCs from bare-board to bootup in under 5 minutes. I never met a screwdriver I didn't like.

I was also a copy chief and a fact checker early in my career. (Editing and polishing technical content to make it palatable for consumer audiences is my forte.) I also worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

The Technology I Use

I use a lot of computers on rotation in my daily work, but I rely on just a few to get things done. I split my work life mostly between a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (a 15-inch Ryzen model), paired with a Lenovo ThinkVision portable monitor, and a custom-built big-chassis Windows 10 desktop PC that has served me well for years now. (Specs: Liquid-cooled Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition, 32GB of RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1080 card.) That's all in a giant chassis with six hard drives and SSDs packing its bays. (As I upgrade systems, I just keep moving the old warhorse drives over.) This behemoth is hooked up to a 32-inch LG monitor.

I also have a bunch of PCs around the house, all custom builds: another one attached to my main TV (for gaming and occasional forays into VR), a mini-PC on the bedroom TV (acting as a media server), and a Mini-ITX desktop in a corner of the living room...just because. I carry around an oversize OnePlus phone, but when I do long-haul travel, a vintage iPod Touch comes along, too, for old times' sake.

I wasn't always a PC guy. I cut my teeth on a cassette-drive-equipped Commodore VIC-20 in the 1980s. But I got serious with Apple desktops in the early 1990s, starting with a Macintosh SE, then a Macintosh LC, and finally one of the short-lived Umax "clone" Macs, before building my first PC and never looking back.

With all my typing and editing work over the years, I've become a huge proponent of thumb trackballs, which minimize wrist action (and my wrist pain). I have a secret cache of the long-discontinued Microsoft Trackball Optical Mouse (my personal favorite), held in an undisclosed location.

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