Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Lenovo made a rolling laptop”.
So 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 4×3 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 8×9 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 8×9 displays kind of like being two 16×9 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 15×9 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 22×9 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 got ta. 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 got ta 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 .