Here is a question worth asking every year at Mobile World Congress: which of the shiny concepts on the Barcelona show floor will actually survive contact with the consumer market? MWC 2026 has served up two of the most compelling modular hardware pitches in years, one for laptops and one for smartphones, and both deserve more than a reflexive eye-roll from an industry that has seen this before.
Lenovo's entry is the more immediately convincing. The ThinkBook Modular AI PC Concept is centred on a "carry small, use big" philosophy, built into a 14-inch ultra-thin chassis that can have a secondary display mounted on the top cover for face-to-face collaboration or a tablet-like experience when the lid is closed. Swap the display with the keyboard and the combined viewing area reaches roughly 19 inches; other modular components include a detachable Bluetooth keyboard and interchangeable USB Type-A, USB Type-C, and HDMI ports. The specs Lenovo is showing at MWC include an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.
The keyboard is not permanently fixed to the base; it clips into place with pogo pins and magnets, and detaches easily to be used wirelessly via Bluetooth. Remove it, and a second 14-inch display can attach to the same magnets and pogo pins, allowing a dual-screen configuration in horizontal or vertical orientations. Lenovo also placed pogo pins and magnets on the outside of the lid, allowing users to mount the second display in an outward-facing manner for presentations or collaboration. The swappable port system is perhaps the least glamorous feature here, but arguably the most practically useful: one bay on either side of the chassis can be filled with your choice of USB-C, HDMI, or USB-A connector.
Without the second screen attached, the laptop weighs less than one kilogram. That is a genuine selling point. The business traveller who needs an ultraportable machine for the flight but a proper dual-screen setup at the hotel desk now has a single device that serves both purposes, rather than carrying a portable monitor as luggage. The appeal is not theoretical; it is the kind of practical flexibility that corporate procurement officers should find interesting.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration: modular design almost always means compromise. There are genuine trade-offs; keyboard travel is noticeably less than on a conventional laptop, and the detached keyboard slides on smooth surfaces. When the secondary display is placed where the keyboard normally sits, there is a significant gap between the two panels, and Lenovo has not yet solved the problem of positioning them horizontally side by side. These are not trivial criticisms. A laptop that looks awkward in a side-by-side configuration is one that business users will quietly return to the shelf.
Meanwhile, on the smartphone side of the show floor, Tecno is taking another run at a concept the industry has discarded more than once. The Tecno Modular Phone concept features an ultra-thin base device measuring just 4.9mm in thickness. The connection system between the phone and its accessories uses a hybrid architecture; a rectangular magnetic array secures the modules physically, while data transmission is automatically routed using a combination of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and millimetre-wave technology. Around ten modules are on offer, including various camera lenses, a gaming attachment, and a power bank.
As Engadget reports, the telephoto module alone can deliver up to 20x zoom capability, while battery packs can be stacked to reach around 10,000mAh, exceeding the capacity of most mainstream smartphones. The base phone carries no traditional USB-C charging port at all; instead, a charging module attaches via the pogo-pin connectors. That is either an elegant expression of the modular philosophy or a significant inconvenience, depending on how often you misplace accessories.
Strip away the novelty, and what remains is a well-documented commercial problem. Modular phones are a difficult sell because they often sacrifice the efficiencies that come from unified components. Google ended its Project Ara modular concept more than a decade ago, and Motorola's Moto Mods generated little lasting enthusiasm, while LG's G5 modules are barely remembered at all. Tecno rarely sells its phones in Western Europe or the United States, though moves by other Chinese phone manufacturers over the past year suggest that could change.
The fundamental question is whether 2026 is genuinely different, or whether both Lenovo and Tecno are re-learning the same lesson about why integrated hardware wins in the mass market. The honest answer is: probably somewhere between the two. The biggest historical drawbacks of modular phones included wear on connection mechanisms and software integration bugs, but the maturation of Apple's MagSafe magnetic ecosystem has measurably increased consumer acceptance of magnetic accessories. That shift in consumer familiarity is not nothing.
For Lenovo's ThinkBook concept, the business case is cleaner. The target buyer is not a consumer choosing between a phone and a camera; it is a professional who already carries a laptop and a portable monitor and would prefer one device. This being a concept still under development, Lenovo has not shared any timeframe for a commercial launch, or confirmed whether it will launch at all. That ambiguity is frustrating, but it is also honest: Lenovo is testing appetite rather than over-promising.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether either of these concepts has the commercial legs to survive the journey from Barcelona exhibition stand to retail shelf. What is clear is that the modular idea keeps returning because a genuine consumer need underlies it: the desire for devices that adapt to context rather than forcing the user to adapt to the device. Whether the engineering and the economics can finally align is a question that only a product launch, and actual sales figures, can answer. The concepts themselves are, at minimum, the most credible versions of this argument the industry has produced in years.