For a conventional computer company, Lenovo never fails to make a splash at CES, regardless of whether the experimental products are actually practical to use.
This year, the company has not one but two laptops with rollable OLED screens, one of which is a gaming laptop that can expand its display horizontally, adding an extra eight inches of screen real estate—all with the press of just a single key.
You never knew you needed a screen that could do that, but it’s exactly the kind of oddball tech CES is all about.
Rolling Out
Photograph: Luke Larsen
Photograph: Luke Larsen
The first rollable experiment this year is the most daring, the Legion Pro Rollable Concept. It’s a 16-inch gaming laptop with a screen that can expand horizontally to a 21.5-inch “Tactical” mode, or all the way up to a 24-inch “Arena” mode. Let’s be real: a screen much wider than the laptop housing it looks wacky. And it requires the laptop lid to be comically thick.
But with the popularity of ultrawide external monitors for gaming, it does make a certain amount of sense. A 24-inch screen coming from the footprint of a 16-inch laptop is pretty awesome especially if you’re someone who wants to take their gaming laptop on the go, whether while traveling or even just from one part of your house to another. Like the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable OLED laptop that came out last year, the full OLED screen is hidden until triggered to unroll with a key press. In this case, the laptop uses two motors that unrolls the screen in both directions simultaneously, giving you that ultrawide aspect ratio when fully expanded. Beyond that, it’s built on the chassis of a Legion Pro 7i, so in theory a laptop like this would feature high-end components similar to what’s in that model, like RTX 5090 graphics and the latest Intel processors.
Going Up
Lenovo has also announced the ThinkPad Rollable XD Concept, which iterates on its previous rollable design that expands the screen vertically. It still starts with smaller OLED display (this time a 13.3-inch screen) and can be expanded up to 16 inches with one keystroke. This is an even more dramatic transformation than last year’s ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, which starts at a 14-inch size before growing.
Rather than hiding the extra screen real estate rolled up under the hinge, this new concept gives you use of it on the lid. Lenovo calls this a “world-facing” screen, but it’s not clear exactly what the use case for this additional display area would be. The demo unit had some placeholder widgets but nothing that functioned yet.
This is not Lenovo’s first exploration of putting screens on the lid, but so far they have been always-on, digital-ink screens that only sip power and don’t tax the battery too much. I do like the look of this design better, especially being able to see the screen wrap around the top. The problem is that it requires the webcam to sit over on the side, kind of like on an iPad. Definitely not an ideal spot for video calls.
Both of these rolling-screen computers are mere concepts at this point, but Lenovo has a track record of actually releasing some of these flashy tech concepts.
Lenovo is also announcing the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist. This was a concept we first saw a few years ago, which uses a motorized hinge to twist the screen around in either direction. This enables the device to follow you around a room during a video call and even transform into tablet mode just by using a voice command. It still feels like a bit of a work in progress, but it shows that these proof-of-concept projects are more than just novelties.
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