The last time I was at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2019, foldables were the new thing in town. Samsung had announced, but not released, its first Galaxy Fold, and Huawei showed off its own foldable at the show: the Mate X. Four years and a pandemic later, Lenovo is back at the same show to launch for a guy of a subtly different future, one in which the screens of laptops and smartphones can gradually expand to offer more screen real estate, rather than having to fully unfold like books.
I got a chance to see firsthand both devices, which were first teased by the company last October. There’s a rollable laptop and a rollable smartphone that Lenovo currently brands as a Motorola device (Lenovo acquired the phone brand nearly a decade ago in 2014). But Lenovo is emphasizing that both are early proof-of-concept devices, and the reps didn’t answer any of my questions about when they might be released to the public or how much they might cost when they do. I didn’t even get a chance to hold the devices by myself.
But both offer interesting insight into how the transformation of screens could influence the future of phones and laptops alike, and they highlight the kinds of functionality that could be possible once you move past the idea of a screen as a immovable flat object.
Before we get into the signature feature of the concept laptop, it’s worth noting just how unassuming the device looks before the screen unfolds. Lenovo had the device sitting next to its other laptops in a conference room, and not a single one of the dozen or so journalists present noticed that it was anything more than a standard ThinkPad. In its non-extended form, it has a regular 12.7-inch screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio.
All of that changes with the flick of a small switch to the right of the chassis, at which point you can hear some motors hum and the screen extends upwards. That switch causes a pair of motors in the laptop to kick into action, pulling the screen out from under the laptop’s keyboard to raise it more or less vertically in front of you. It’s an admittedly slow process on this device concept (from our pictures it looks like it takes a little over ten seconds to fully extend), but in the end you’re left with a nearly square 15.3-inch screen with a ratio of 8:9 aspect.
It’s like having two 16:9 screens on top of each other
The device brings to mind LG’s sleek (and incredibly expensive) rollable TV that’s designed to roll up when you’re not using it. Only in Lenovo’s case, the screen slides into the laptop’s keyboard instead of a small box, and it can’t slide out all the way either. Once fully extended, the Lenovo laptop’s screen has a small crease where it originally folded under the keyboard. But again, it’s a prototype.
In terms of resolution, the screen is 2024 x 1604 when in small mode and 2024 x 2368 when fully extended. So, in theory at least, it’s quite usable without having to fully extend the screen. The screen is supplied by Sharp, which is also the company Lenovo worked with on its ThinkPad X1 foldable laptops. Display competitor Samsung Display also announced it’s working on portable roll-up displays with Intel, but its prototype didn’t appear to have a keyboard attached.
When fully unrolled, Lenovo’s rollable laptop has an oddly tall screen with an 8:9 aspect ratio, which the company notes is like having two 16:9 screens on top of each other. It’s not unlike the dual-screen Yoga Book 9i we tested at CES, which is set to launch in June. It’s a form factor that could be useful for anyone who has a hard time working on a single small laptop screen and has considered buying an external display (or, for that matter, an iPad) to double as a second portable monitor.
Lenovo believes such a tall display could be useful to office workers and creative professionals alike, offering everything from more lines of code to more cells in a spreadsheet or, for me personally, being able to type in half. bottom of the screen. while keeping notes and sources visible in the top half. Many people like to use vertical monitors with their desktop PCs, and Windows has no problem stacking windows one on top and one below the other.
As polished as the device looked in our demo, Lenovo is clearly not ready to launch its rollable concept as a consumer-ready device. I asked about durability and Lenovo just said that they’re aiming for 20,000 to 30,000 rolls, the same ballpark as their foldable ThinkPad X1 (I’ll admit, this doesn’t sound like much compared to the hundreds of thousands of folds that Folding smartphones tend to be classified, but I guess you unfold and fold a laptop less often during a workday.) The company did not communicate how many rolls the prototype can currently survive.
I also had questions about the weight and battery life. Lenovo did not tell me how much the laptop weighed, and I was not allowed to pick it up myself (believe me, I asked). Ideally, you would want this thing to be lighter than carrying around a laptop and portable monitor, as well as being more compact, but we will have to wait and see in the previous point. And apparently, the roll-up laptop’s unwind mechanism consumes a couple of watts of power while on the go, which doesn’t sound ideal at a time when many laptop batteries can still struggle to survive a day of use. .
That said, Lenovo is one of the few laptop manufacturers to have released a foldable laptop, which gives me some confidence that its rollable concept could one day become a reality. Its original ThinkPad X1 Fold went on sale in 2020, and a second-generation model was announced last year, though it has yet to hit the market after missing the November shipping date.
lenovo other The rollable device you’re demonstrating at MWC is a Motorola smartphone. We’ve seen numerous companies, including Samsung Display, Oppo, TCL, and even LG (RIP), show off rollable concept devices in various stages of development over the years, but we’ve yet to see the technology make its way into a consumer device. .
Much 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 more screen to get the job done. Lenovo’s phone, which it calls Motorola’s rollable smartphone concept, is all about taking a small square of screen and making it longer. It’s almost like a flip phone, but without a secondary cover screen because it’s the same screen all the time.
When everything is rolled up neatly, Lenovo’s Motorola Rollable offers a 5-inch display with a 15:9 aspect ratio. Then, with a small double-tap of a side button, the screen folds out to give you a remarkably tall 6.5-inch display with a 22:9 aspect ratio.
Lenovo gets a lot out of this seemingly simple design. There are the obvious use cases, like being able to watch a video in its native aspect ratio without black bars, or getting a bigger screen when you want to write an email. Lenovo’s idea is for the phone to automatically adjust its screen to better suit different apps, and it hopes the final version will allow users to customize how big they want the screen to be for each use case.
There are also some less obvious elements of the device. Because the roll-up screen rotates around the bottom of the phone instead of disappearing into its chassis, you’re left with a small secondary screen on the back when it’s rolled up. Software features for this include using it as a viewfinder when taking selfies with the phone’s rear cameras. Lenovo has even included a feature where the rear screen plays cute eye-catching animations so that a child will look at the phone when you want to take a picture of them. That said, if the clamshell screen on foldable phones like Samsung and Oppo is anything to go by, finding really useful things for tiny screens like this can be a challenge.
Another cool touch is that the display can hide the selfie camera and earpiece, and slide down to reveal them when you’re making a phone call or going to take a selfie.
As with the laptop, Motorola’s rollable smartphone concept is a proof of concept, and there were plenty of questions Lenovo didn’t have answers for, like how many rolls the screen can survive. There’s no word on the price, and not even a hint as to when this device might be released. I didn’t get a chance to hold or use the device myself.
But again, given Lenovo’s history with foldable phones (remember the Razr?), I think there’s a non-zero chance this technology will show up in a Motorola-branded phone one day.
In 2019, it seemed like foldable phones were about to become the next big thing in the world of smartphones. But four years later, it seems we’re still waiting for this future to become a widespread reality. Lenovo would be the first to admit that its rollable concept devices are far from ready for prime time, but they make a compelling case for an alternative rollable future.
Photography by Jon Porter / The Verge
