Lenovo’s Tab Wear Collection: A Clothing Proof-of-Concept for Taking Tablets Outdoors

Amsterdam designer Maium’s giant pink jacket, the one you can buy, costs €499 (around $530). This is a longer style that covers your arms and legs to keep you dry if you walk or cycle in the rain. Plus, it swells! This helps increase its insulating powers, but also gives it extra padding so you can use the whole thing as a blanket if you’re at the park. Better yet, you can turn the jacket into a hammock (yes, really) and take a nap inside. Naturally, there is a zipped pocket on the front and back to store a tablet.

Finally, there is the design of Hong Kong’s Kit Wan Studios. This one is a little more over there thanks to the steampunk-style pieces of metal sticking out of the tactical vest. Loosen the vest and it also serves to hold the tablet in place so you can use it hands-free. The rest of the outfit has a clever clipping system allowing you to attach or detach several of its pieces in a modular way.

Lenovo’s Tab Wear collection isn’t the first time the worlds of fashion and technology have merged. Google is famous in partnership with Levi’s to make denim jackets that can understand touch gestures to trigger certain activities on your smartphone, like advancing tracks in a playlist or finding the ETA of your Uber ride.

It’s not really about wearables, but Lenovo-owned Motorola also recently introduced a foldable screen for smartphone you can put on your wrist like a bracelet. Humane, the promising future, also relies heavily fashionable with its AI Pin, which debuted at Paris Fashion Week. I’ve always loved it when tech companies think beyond the routine of iterative upgrades and spark new product ideas. Lenovo’s concept is fun, although perhaps we should think of the outdoors as a place to take a break from our screens rather than somewhere we can use them even more.

As much as I like Lenovo’s jackets, I would prefer if the company supported the software on its tablets for a longer period of time by offering more Android upgrades and security patches. Maybe I’ll spend $500 on a jacket to take one everywhere.