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.
The back of the lid shows some screen too. Photograph: Julian Chokkattu The screen expanded.
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