Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Rebooting The Smartphone & Laptop – As Rollables! (Motorola RIZR First Look)”.
For the past five years, my videos from Tech conferences have been thoughtfully, considered, rigorously, copywritten and usually shot on something a little nicer than a smartphone, but the two products I just saw here at Mobile World Congress 2023. Well, they might be worth a little change of pace. Lenovo is here in Barcelona and in tow they’ve brought the highlights from CES back in January, alongside a new smattering of laptops, to bolster their mid-range and business-centric lineups. But what caught my imagination and pulled me back into 2016? Hands-On video territory was what Lenovo was showing off in the Next Room over two concepts from two categories based on one philosophy: maybe the future is rollable. Let’S start with the laptop when it’s closed, it looks like any other low profile. Lenovo think book open it up and it still looks like a 12.7 inch notebook. What, if you need more room? Well, flip a switch on the side and an assembly of motors and springs spring into action to stretch that plastic OLED vertically into a 15.3 inch screen. This might seem like an odd aspect, ratio for a PC display, but it’s in line with lenovo’s recent aspirational laptops. Like the yoga book 9i and ThinkPad X1 fold, the company sees a lot of opportunity for vertically stacked workspaces for professions that involve a lot of scrolling and it’s easier to accomplish this in a compact device than it would be a landscape. Dual screen implementation Lenovo pointed out that this is quote nowhere near full deployment, speed for the mechanism, but my favorite quote came when I asked if there was any possibility, this concept actually ships to customers, lenovo’s response, we prefer to develop Concepts that we have a hope Of selling nice across the room, lenovo’s phone brand Motorola was less forthcoming, but had something in hand that to me was even more interesting: no not the think phone from CES and no not another version of the Razer, but instead a Revival of that iconic phone’s, sibling. 2006’S off forgotten riser, the Motorola insisted that it’s actually called the Motorola concept foldable. When I pointed out the brand Riser emblazoned on the back, but I don’t care I’m calling it. The riser, like the laptop, the Riser, starts out conventional style in this case.
As a simple squarish, 5-inch Android slab double-click a button on the side, though, and the phone elongates stretching vertically until it measures 6.5 inches on the diagonal. That doesn’t sound like much. But, as notebook check pointed out when this phone first broke cover at Lenovo Tech, World 2022, that’s like going from an iPhone Mini to an iPhone Pro Max at the push of a button when it’s time to take a call or a selfie. The screen slides the other way down to expose the earpiece and FFC we’ve seen Concepts like this before, but this one stands out to me in three ways. First of all, most of the demos I’ve seen from, for example, TCL or Samsung display have been landscape or horizontal rollables. Well, the Riser is the rare case of a vertically extending device which makes a lot more sense in the context of phones, as we know them today.
Second, Motorola’s design rolls the screen around the bottom Edge and leaves a small area Exposed on the back of the phone, which means, if you put it face down, you’ll, still be able to see notifications and when you use it as a camera, subjects can get a Backside preview of the shot and third I’ve seen this design before Lenovo Tech world, even Motorola, has been working on it for a while, which gives me more hope than usual that we might actually see it offered as a real product that real people can buy. Of course, that’s just the beginning of the questions, because in one important way a rollable phone is the exact opposite of the foldables. You know I love, there’s, no closing it.
The screen is always Exposed on the outside of the device, and it’s just a plastic OLED panel, necessarily soft, so it can take that turn around the chin. That’S probably one of the reasons Motorola was showing it off in this accessory case, which it wouldn’t take off and on top of all that the Riser doesn’t offer the same portability as a clamshell foldable like the Razer Galaxy Flip or find N2 flip. So it’s anyone’s guess whether this will actually come to Market, but presenting these, both together after at least a year of development and probably much longer and cementing it with that quote about only developing Concepts.
It plans to try to ship well, it all has me wondering if rollables are more than a trade show, attention grab and actually a potential future for lenovo’s higher end mobile devices. Personally, that’s a future I’d love to see, and it’s glimpses of that potential future that have me so excited to return to trade shows like mwc. After a four-year absence, this Hands-On was produced following about a half hour with lenovo’s rollable Concepts, one of which better will be called the Riser at mwc 2023 in Barcelona disclosure, my travel lodging and dining for the show was provided by Honor stay tuned to the Mr Mobile on Instagram and subscribe on YouTube for more coverage on bleeding edge, mobile devices and hey. Let me know if you enjoyed or abhorred this break from the norm down in the comments until next time from an increasingly noisy Lobby here at Mobile World Congress. I’Ve been Michael Fisher thanks for watching and stay mobile. My friends .