Lenovo’s Legion Pro Rollable Gaming Laptop Goes Ultrawide at the Press of a Key

For a conventional machine company, Lenovo ne'er fails to marque a splash astatine CES, careless of whether the experimental products are really applicable to use.

This year, the institution has not 1 but 2 laptops with rollable OLED screens, 1 of which is simply a gaming laptop that tin grow its show horizontally, adding an other 8 inches of surface existent estate—all with the property of conscionable a azygous key.

You ne'er knew you needed a surface that could bash that, but it's precisely the benignant of oddball tech CES is each about.

Rolling Out

The archetypal rollable experimentation this twelvemonth is the astir daring, the Legion Pro Rollable Concept. It’s a 16-inch gaming laptop with a surface that tin grow horizontally to a 21.5-inch “Tactical” mode, oregon each the mode up to a 24-inch “Arena” mode. Let’s beryllium real: a surface overmuch wider than the laptop lodging it looks wacky. And it requires the laptop lid to beryllium comically thick.

But with the popularity of ultrawide outer monitors for gaming, it does marque a definite magnitude of sense. A 24-inch surface coming from the footprint of a 16-inch laptop is beauteous awesome particularly if you’re idiosyncratic who wants to instrumentality their gaming laptop connected the go, whether portion traveling oregon adjacent conscionable from 1 portion of your location to another. Like the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable OLED laptop that came retired past year, the afloat OLED surface is hidden until triggered to unroll with a cardinal press. In this case, the laptop uses 2 motors that unrolls the surface successful some directions simultaneously, giving you that ultrawide facet ratio erstwhile afloat expanded. Beyond that, it's built connected the chassis of a Legion Pro 7i, truthful successful mentation a laptop similar this would diagnostic high-end components akin to what's successful that model, similar RTX 5090 graphics and the latest Intel processors.

Going Up

Lenovo has besides announced the ThinkPad Rollable XD Concept, which iterates connected its erstwhile rollable plan that expands the surface vertically. It inactive starts with smaller OLED show (this clip a 13.3-inch screen) and tin beryllium expanded up to 16 inches with 1 keystroke. This is an adjacent much melodramatic translation than past year's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, which starts astatine a 14-inch size earlier growing.

Rather than hiding the other surface existent property rolled up nether the hinge, this caller conception gives you usage of it connected the lid. Lenovo calls this a “world-facing” screen, but it's not wide precisely what the usage lawsuit for this further show country would be. The demo portion had immoderate placeholder widgets but thing that functioned yet.

This is not Lenovo’s archetypal exploration of putting screens connected the lid, but truthful acold they person been always-on, digital-ink screens that lone sip powerfulness and don't taxation the artillery excessively much. I bash similar the look of this plan better, particularly being capable to spot the surface wrapper astir the top. The occupation is that it requires the webcam to beryllium implicit connected the side, benignant of similar connected an iPad. Definitely not an perfect spot for video calls.

Both of these rolling-screen computers are specified concepts astatine this point, but Lenovo has a way grounds of really releasing immoderate of these flashy tech concepts.

Lenovo is besides announcing the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist. This was a conception we archetypal saw a fewer years ago, which uses a motorized hinge to twist the surface astir successful either direction. This enables the instrumentality to travel you astir a country during a video telephone and adjacent alteration into tablet mode conscionable by utilizing a dependable command. It inactive feels similar a spot of a enactment successful progress, but it shows that these proof-of-concept projects are much than conscionable novelties.