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5 minute read
Summary
In this special New Product Alert, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr interviews Markus Høy-Petersen, Senior Director of Portfolio Vision and Strategy at Neat, to unveil the Neat Board 32—a compact all-in-one collaboration device designed for huddle spaces and personal workstations. Recorded live at GITEX 2025, this exclusive walkthrough dives into the design, functionality, and engineering precision behind Neat’s latest addition to its portfolio.
Their discussion covers:
- Compact Collaboration Design: How the 32-inch Neat Board brings a sleek, Scandinavian-inspired form factor to smaller spaces without sacrificing capability.
- Versatile Mounting Options: The flexibility of the integrated VESA mount, wall mount, and ergonomic stand for shared or personal workspaces.
- Optimized Audio and Video: Innovations in lens design, microphone pickup, and Neat Symmetry technology that ensure natural framing and crystal-clear meetings.
- Thoughtful Engineering: Insights into the custom hinge mechanism that balances stability with touch functionality for interactive use.
- Launch Details: Expected availability in the first half of 2026, with hands-on demos showcased at GITEX and upcoming industry events.
Transcript
Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder at the Collab Collective. Now, one of the things I love to bring to you guys is when some of my favorite companies bring new products to market. And Neat has just announced something new at GITEX. It is part of their new Neat Board portfolio, and I'm excited to have a chance to walk you through the product right now. To help me walk through it is actually someone who is very deeply involved in the design and build of this product. And that's Markus Høy-Petersen.
Markus Høy-Petersen: Hey, Craig
Craig Durr: Senior Director of Portfolio Vision and Strategy. I was going to get that right that time. Thank you for being very patient with it.
So I heard about the announcement. You've got it here as if it's going to be a big unveiling. Let's go ahead and unveil it right now and talk about it.
Markus Høy-Petersen: Let's do it. So the Neat Board 32 is an all-in-one 32-inch device that's designed for huddle spaces and or individual use cases. So it's under this cover. Do you want to pull it off? Let's do it together. Ready? 1, 2, 3, there you go.
Craig Durr: It's a beautiful device. Now, let's go on the side here. Let's take a look at the design. The industrial ID in itself. It's beautiful. It's slim, it's slick. I love this stand.
Markus Høy-Petersen: Yeah. It follows our Neat design, which is a very Scandinavian-inspired design language. So it's clean surfaces, and we bring in a lot of warm materials to break down the barriers of use. So we want to make it look friendly and appealing. We also spend a lot of time, as you said, to make it very slim so you can squeeze it into smaller spaces. It's a 32-inch thing, right? So by its physical dimension, it's big. So it's important to kind of squeeze where you can not to make a bigger footprint than what you need.
Here it's shown on the stand that ships with every single device, but it also has incorporated into the design a 100 by 100 VESA mount so you can mount it, what have you. It comes with a wall mount, as well, so that you can hang it on the wall. And we have another trick up our sleeve, I think we'll talk about a bit later. That's more for the ergonomic type desk.
Craig Durr: Oh, you're right, but let's go ahead and take a look at the front side of this right now. So one of the key things that you had to do is to adjust for this use case. Here we are in the equivalent of what I would call a totem table, where you might have it set up in the beginning. And I'm sure you had to do some adjustment in terms of the audio and the video treatment, right?
Markus Høy-Petersen: A hundred percent. Here's a privacy shutter. We spent a lot of time getting the optics on the lens right for this because when you're capturing someone in a space like this, we're pretty close up to the side. And to frame us, we need a lens that see wider. But normally, that results in stretching of the picture, and we don't want that.
The same thing goes for the microphones. We need a wide pickup to pick those up. And the viewing angle of the display is also critical. So if I now start a meeting here, you can see how wide the lens picks up.
Craig Durr: They’re perfect. You also told me that there's some special modes that I think are fantastic. I want to show them, for example, here's the auto framing, the side by side… Now we're also getting that camera. We've got you and I, so now for that far end, it's actually closing this distance. It's using some of your Neat symmetry technology and actually closing in. There's some wonderful things here. We're aligned in the same size here.
Markus Høy-Petersen: The camera’s at eye level. See our heads are not warped or deformed. So it renders faces.
Craig Durr: And it's very easy to warp my head, just so you know.
Markus Høy-Petersen: Mine as well. I have a big head.
Craig Durr: So the audio and video use case-specialized, which is beautiful for this, but this is 50% of the use case in terms of a shared space. There's also an opportunity to do this as a shared desk or even a personal desk experience, right? And you have that set up over here, right? Let's go ahead and walk over there and take a look at that and see that then.
Now, this is what I might call… it could start off again as a shared use case, but it could also maybe be the executive desk experience, right?
Markus Høy-Petersen: Yeah, or a shared focus space. Here, we have the same device. Now it's mounted on what I call this ergonomic stand. So what that means is that it can be moved up and down like this. You can twist the angle, or you can twist it like this. This is now mounted on what you find in many places, like a lower type desk, and it's mounted using a clamp, so that makes sure you can get it all the way to the edge of the table without it falling off. And you build in some security with this clamp mechanism. This stand comes with a clamp but also a normal base, so you can put it on the desk.
I'm nerding out now because we spent so much time on this hinge behind here. So I need to tell you about it. Normally, these bases or these stands rotate on the base, but when you're clamping something to the edge of the table, you can only rotate the base, right? And this is also a touch screen, so many of these monitor brackets are pretty wobbly. But this is pretty solid compared to other monitors. So the engineering hours that went into the hinge on the back here is out of this world.
Craig Durr: I can just imagine how much you spent time on that. What that means time was spent into the audio and video experience as well.
Markus Høy-Petersen: Yeah, all of these things, but you need all of these details to be right for it to be a good product, right? You can't give up on any of those because if they fall down, then you sort of degrade the experience.
Craig Durr: This is great. So announced here, we're talking about some time in the first half of 2026?
Markus Høy-Petersen: Correct
Craig Durr: Do I give you my address now so you can ship one to me?
Markus Høy-Petersen: Sure, go for it.
Craig Durr: Well, I appreciate this, Marcus. This is a great introduction to this product. Now I have it—I assume people will have a chance to see this, not only at GITEX, but they'll probably have a chance to see it at other shows.
Markus Høy-Petersen: You need to touch and feel these things to understand it.
Craig Durr: Well, I appreciate it. Thanks so much.
All right, hey everyone, this is Craig Durr and Marcus, bringing to you the new Neat board 32. Keep an eye out for this product. This is something exciting. I'm looking forward to getting it.
Markus Høy-Petersen: You don't want to miss this
Craig Durr: Yeah, you don't want to miss this one. Take care, everyone!
