Lenovo's Latest Experiment: A Foldable Laptop Concept with a Rollable Twist

In a bid to shake up the laptop market, Lenovo has unveiled a concept device that combines two innovative technologies: folding and rolling. The foldable laptop, dubbed the ThinkPad X1 Fold 2, takes its predecessor's design and adds a new twist - a rollable mechanism that allows the screen to unfurl like a scroll.

Folding laptops have been making waves in recent years, with hundreds of thousands of folds expected from these devices. However, Lenovo suggests that their foldable laptop is designed for more moderate use cases, such as checking messages or emails. The device's design implies that users won't be opening and closing it every single time they need to access something.

One of the key features of the ThinkPad X1 Fold 2 is its ability to dynamically adjust its screen size depending on the app being used. The screen will stretch out from a compact, five-inch rectangle to a full 6.5 inches with a 22x9 aspect ratio when the user needs more space. This feature is designed to provide users with more flexibility and customization options.

When it comes to durability, Lenovo didn't reveal much in terms of how well the rollable mechanism would hold up over time. They also didn't offer any information on pricing or release dates for this device.

A Look at Lenovo's Rollable Smartphone Concept

Lenovo isn't just experimenting with laptops; they're also exploring new possibilities in smartphone design. The Motorola Rollable Smartphone concept takes a different approach to the foldable technology, using a rollable mechanism to extend the screen from a compact square shape to a larger rectangle.

The device starts off as a small five-inch display with a 15x9 aspect ratio when it's in its compact mode. When you tap the side button, the screen unfurls to reveal a full 6.5 inch display with a 22x9 aspect ratio. This allows users to watch videos or browse web pages without any black bars or letterboxing.

One of the most interesting features of this concept is that the screen doesn't disappear into the chassis when it rolls down; instead, it rolls around to the rear of the phone. Lenovo suggests that this could be useful as a viewfinder for selfies, with animations playing on the rear display to entice children to take photos.

Another cool feature is the ability to hide the selfie camera in the earpiece when not needed. This design element would allow users to seamlessly switch between taking calls and capturing selfies without any interruptions.

A Hands-Off Experience: Lenovo's Prototype

During our briefing, we were told that this was a hands-off experience, with no opportunity to try out the device for ourselves. While it was disappointing not to have hands-on time with the Motorola Rollable Smartphone concept, it did spark curiosity about its potential impact on the market.

One thing is clear: Lenovo isn't afraid to experiment with new technologies and concepts. Their ThinkPad X1 Fold 2 laptop is already an affordable offering in the foldable laptop space, so a rollable device could be next in line for public release. The possibilities of these innovative devices are endless, and it will be interesting to see how they fare in the market.

A Word from the Author

As we wrap up our coverage of Lenovo's latest concept devices, I'd love to ask one question: is there a place for rollable smartphones in the affordable future? While foldables have already dominated the market, the idea of an over-rollables could be a game-changer. With manufacturers like Oppo and Samsung already experimenting with this technology, it will be exciting to see where Lenovo takes their concept next.

Stay Tuned for MWC Coverage

As we head into MWC Barcelona, our team will be bringing you all the latest news from the show floor. Keep an eye on our site for exclusive coverage of the top announcements and reveals from the biggest names in tech. From foldables to 5G, we'll have it all covered.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso the last time I was at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2019 foldables with a new hotness in town Samsung had announced but not released its first Galaxy fold and Huawei also had a foldable of its own the mate X but that was four years and one pandemic ago but in 2023 Lenovo is looking ahead to rollables so today we've had a first-hand look at a pair of rollable devices from Lenovo as a rollable phone and a rollable laptop and both of these days showed off in a video last October now it's worth emphasizing that both of these are very early concept devices and Lenovo isn't ready to talk about pricing or release dates just yet I didn't even get a chance to hold the devices for myself but both of them are a really interesting look at how transforming screens might influence the future of both phones and laptops alike let's start with a laptop because honestly it's unlike anything I've ever seen before the first thing to note about lenovo's concept laptop which is just calling it rollable laptop for now is just how unassuming its appearance is I mean you really have no idea what this thing is capable of until it starts unrolling and a group of us journalists just walked straight past it at first thinking it was just one of lenovo's other 12.7 inch laptops with a 4x3 aspect ratio display that all changes with a flip of a small switch on the right of the chassis at which point you can hear some Motors wearing and the screen extends upwards What's Happening Here is the screen is is kind of being pulled out from underneath the laptop's keyboard and being displayed more or less vertically it's a kind of slow process on this concept device that took maybe over 10 seconds but eventually you're left with an almost Square 15.3 inch display with an 8x9 aspect ratio it's a little bit like LG's fancy rollable TV that could roll down into a little box when you're not using it only here the screen is disappearing into the keyboard and it also doesn't entirely fold away there's a small crease visible when the screen's fully extended but again it's a prototype in terms of resolution the display is 2024 by 1604 when unextended and 2024 by 20 I'm just going to put it up on screen oh yeah of course yeah 2368 when fully extended but basically the takeaway is that it's pretty usable without having to fully extend the display the screen is applied by sharp which on over has previously worked with on its ThinkPad X1 foldable so in terms of why you might want a laptop that can do this other than it just being cool as hell the think of an 8x9 displays kind of like being two 16x9 displays on top of each other which is great news for anyone like me who really struggles to work on just a single laptop display and has been tempted multiple times to buy a laptop just to use as a secondary MacBook display so the setup might be useful for coders to see more lines of text or for office workers to see more cells and Excel or content creators you can see more content and it would definitely be useful for me being able to have a video script in the bottom half of the screen and interview notes on the top path plenty of people like to use vertical monitors with their desktop PCS so clearly it's a useful form factor and windows is app windowing support can handle pretty much whatever weird screen sizes you throw at it okay so the elephant in the room is that Lenovo isn't ready to talk about releasing this as a consumer device and the more questions I asked about it the better of an idea I got about why I asked about durability and Lenovo said that it would like to get to a point where it's in the same ballpark as it's fold X1 where it could survive maybe 20 to 30 000 folds but it doesn't sound like it's there yet I admit that that doesn't sound like much compared to the hundreds of thousands of folds that foldable smartphones are typically rated for but I guess for the laptop you tend to open and close it far fewer times a day rather than every single time you want to check your messages there are also questions about weight and battery life now Lenovo wouldn't tell me how much this thing weighs and they also wouldn't let me pick it up trust me I asked and then in terms of battery life apparently the rollable mechanism draws maybe a couple of watts of power which doesn't sound like that much but I don't love it in an era where laptops sometimes still struggle to get through a full day's worth of use that said the local is one of the few laptop manufacturers to have actually got an affordable laptop out the door it released its original ThinkPad X1 fold in 2020 and announced a follow-up last year so I think if it's showing off prototypes there's at least some chance this might make it to a consumer release I think it's fair to say this company isn't afraid to experiment with new laptop Concepts so fingers crossed this rollable concept gets the same treatment now lenovo's other device is a rollable smartphone now there have been plenty of concept devices showing up over the years in various stages of development by the likes of Samsung display TCL and Oppo but when it comes to devices that are actually available to buy it's basically foldables anyway like a foldable the idea is that a rollable smartphone can be small when you need it to be portable and big when you need it to be well big oppo's rollable concept used its expanding screen to turn from a rectangle into more of a square but lenovo's phone which is calling the Motorola rollable smartphone concept it's all about taking a small square of a display and making it longer it's functionally kind of like a foldable flip phone but where you don't need a secondary cover display because it's the same screen the entire time so here you're looking at a small five inch display with a 15x9 aspect ratio when the phone's in its compact mode and then with a small double tap of the side button the screen unfurls to give you a full 6.5 inch display with a 22x9 aspect ratio it's pretty damn tall now Lenovo gets a lot of mileage out of a simple seaming design there's the obvious stuff like being able to watch a video in its native aspect ratio with no black bars or getting a bigger screen when you go to compose an email lenovo's idea is the screen will dynamically adjust depending on which app you're using and it hopes that the final version will let users customize exactly how big they want the screen to be for each app but there are also a couple of features of the Motorola concept that weren't immediately apparent so for starters that screen when it's rolling down the bottom it's not actually disappearing into the chassis it's rolling around to the rear of the phone so Lenovo says you might want to use this as a viewfinder when you're taking selfies with the rear cameras and even had a little demo where the rear display played cute eye-catching animations to get a child to look at the phone when he wants to take a photo of them another cool touch is that the display can hide the selfie camera in earpiece I need to reveal them when you make a call or gotta take a selfie like with the laptop it's a concept device and there are plenty of questions that the Lenovo didn't have answers to there was no word on how durable it might be how many roles it might survive there was no details on price or when this thing might actually release and in our briefing at least Lenovo didn't offer us a chance to try the device for ourselves it was very much a hands-off experience but like with the laptop I think there's a non-zero chance this might actually one day make it into public hand remember the liveo is already put out a foldable in the form of Motorola Razor maybe a rollable's next in 2019 we asked whether foldable phones were the future but now I'd love to know is there a space in the affordable future for a couple of cheeky little and over rollables thanks so much for watching guys uh we need to roll the ball along to our next briefing here in Barcelona um but you know keep an eye on the site we've got plenty of news that's terrible um thank you so much for watching guys thank you so much for watching thank you we got it we gotta rollable along to our next briefing at mwc Barcelona as keep an eye on the site for all of the top news from this year's show just because you're shouting the pun louder does this make it work moreso the last time I was at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2019 foldables with a new hotness in town Samsung had announced but not released its first Galaxy fold and Huawei also had a foldable of its own the mate X but that was four years and one pandemic ago but in 2023 Lenovo is looking ahead to rollables so today we've had a first-hand look at a pair of rollable devices from Lenovo as a rollable phone and a rollable laptop and both of these days showed off in a video last October now it's worth emphasizing that both of these are very early concept devices and Lenovo isn't ready to talk about pricing or release dates just yet I didn't even get a chance to hold the devices for myself but both of them are a really interesting look at how transforming screens might influence the future of both phones and laptops alike let's start with a laptop because honestly it's unlike anything I've ever seen before the first thing to note about lenovo's concept laptop which is just calling it rollable laptop for now is just how unassuming its appearance is I mean you really have no idea what this thing is capable of until it starts unrolling and a group of us journalists just walked straight past it at first thinking it was just one of lenovo's other 12.7 inch laptops with a 4x3 aspect ratio display that all changes with a flip of a small switch on the right of the chassis at which point you can hear some Motors wearing and the screen extends upwards What's Happening Here is the screen is is kind of being pulled out from underneath the laptop's keyboard and being displayed more or less vertically it's a kind of slow process on this concept device that took maybe over 10 seconds but eventually you're left with an almost Square 15.3 inch display with an 8x9 aspect ratio it's a little bit like LG's fancy rollable TV that could roll down into a little box when you're not using it only here the screen is disappearing into the keyboard and it also doesn't entirely fold away there's a small crease visible when the screen's fully extended but again it's a prototype in terms of resolution the display is 2024 by 1604 when unextended and 2024 by 20 I'm just going to put it up on screen oh yeah of course yeah 2368 when fully extended but basically the takeaway is that it's pretty usable without having to fully extend the display the screen is applied by sharp which on over has previously worked with on its ThinkPad X1 foldable so in terms of why you might want a laptop that can do this other than it just being cool as hell the think of an 8x9 displays kind of like being two 16x9 displays on top of each other which is great news for anyone like me who really struggles to work on just a single laptop display and has been tempted multiple times to buy a laptop just to use as a secondary MacBook display so the setup might be useful for coders to see more lines of text or for office workers to see more cells and Excel or content creators you can see more content and it would definitely be useful for me being able to have a video script in the bottom half of the screen and interview notes on the top path plenty of people like to use vertical monitors with their desktop PCS so clearly it's a useful form factor and windows is app windowing support can handle pretty much whatever weird screen sizes you throw at it okay so the elephant in the room is that Lenovo isn't ready to talk about releasing this as a consumer device and the more questions I asked about it the better of an idea I got about why I asked about durability and Lenovo said that it would like to get to a point where it's in the same ballpark as it's fold X1 where it could survive maybe 20 to 30 000 folds but it doesn't sound like it's there yet I admit that that doesn't sound like much compared to the hundreds of thousands of folds that foldable smartphones are typically rated for but I guess for the laptop you tend to open and close it far fewer times a day rather than every single time you want to check your messages there are also questions about weight and battery life now Lenovo wouldn't tell me how much this thing weighs and they also wouldn't let me pick it up trust me I asked and then in terms of battery life apparently the rollable mechanism draws maybe a couple of watts of power which doesn't sound like that much but I don't love it in an era where laptops sometimes still struggle to get through a full day's worth of use that said the local is one of the few laptop manufacturers to have actually got an affordable laptop out the door it released its original ThinkPad X1 fold in 2020 and announced a follow-up last year so I think if it's showing off prototypes there's at least some chance this might make it to a consumer release I think it's fair to say this company isn't afraid to experiment with new laptop Concepts so fingers crossed this rollable concept gets the same treatment now lenovo's other device is a rollable smartphone now there have been plenty of concept devices showing up over the years in various stages of development by the likes of Samsung display TCL and Oppo but when it comes to devices that are actually available to buy it's basically foldables anyway like a foldable the idea is that a rollable smartphone can be small when you need it to be portable and big when you need it to be well big oppo's rollable concept used its expanding screen to turn from a rectangle into more of a square but lenovo's phone which is calling the Motorola rollable smartphone concept it's all about taking a small square of a display and making it longer it's functionally kind of like a foldable flip phone but where you don't need a secondary cover display because it's the same screen the entire time so here you're looking at a small five inch display with a 15x9 aspect ratio when the phone's in its compact mode and then with a small double tap of the side button the screen unfurls to give you a full 6.5 inch display with a 22x9 aspect ratio it's pretty damn tall now Lenovo gets a lot of mileage out of a simple seaming design there's the obvious stuff like being able to watch a video in its native aspect ratio with no black bars or getting a bigger screen when you go to compose an email lenovo's idea is the screen will dynamically adjust depending on which app you're using and it hopes that the final version will let users customize exactly how big they want the screen to be for each app but there are also a couple of features of the Motorola concept that weren't immediately apparent so for starters that screen when it's rolling down the bottom it's not actually disappearing into the chassis it's rolling around to the rear of the phone so Lenovo says you might want to use this as a viewfinder when you're taking selfies with the rear cameras and even had a little demo where the rear display played cute eye-catching animations to get a child to look at the phone when he wants to take a photo of them another cool touch is that the display can hide the selfie camera in earpiece I need to reveal them when you make a call or gotta take a selfie like with the laptop it's a concept device and there are plenty of questions that the Lenovo didn't have answers to there was no word on how durable it might be how many roles it might survive there was no details on price or when this thing might actually release and in our briefing at least Lenovo didn't offer us a chance to try the device for ourselves it was very much a hands-off experience but like with the laptop I think there's a non-zero chance this might actually one day make it into public hand remember the liveo is already put out a foldable in the form of Motorola Razor maybe a rollable's next in 2019 we asked whether foldable phones were the future but now I'd love to know is there a space in the affordable future for a couple of cheeky little and over rollables thanks so much for watching guys uh we need to roll the ball along to our next briefing here in Barcelona um but you know keep an eye on the site we've got plenty of news that's terrible um thank you so much for watching guys thank you so much for watching thank you we got it we gotta rollable along to our next briefing at mwc Barcelona as keep an eye on the site for all of the top news from this year's show just because you're shouting the pun louder does this make it work more\n"