Lenovo’s Legion Pro Rollable Gaming Laptop Goes Wide with the Press of a Key
For the general computer company, Lenovo never fails to do something at CES, even if the test products are really practical to use.
This year, the company has not one but two laptops with flexible OLED screens, one of which is a gaming laptop that can stretch its display horizontally, adding an extra eight inches of screen real estate—all with the push of a single key.
You didn’t know you needed a screen that could do that, but that’s the kind of oddball tech CES is all about.
Getting out
Photo: Luke Larsen
Photo: Luke Larsen
The first rollable experiment this year is very daring, the Legion Pro Rollable Concept. A 16-inch gaming laptop with a screen that can expand horizontally to 21.5-inch “Tactical” mode, or up to 24-inch “Arena” mode. Let’s be real: a screen that’s wider than a laptop’s housing looks bad. And it requires a laptop lid to be ridiculously large.
But with the popularity of external ultrawide monitors for games, it makes a certain amount of sense. A 24-inch screen from a 16-inch laptop is great especially if you’re someone who wants to take their gaming laptop with them, whether you’re traveling or moving from one part of your home to another. Like the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable OLED laptop that came out last year, the full OLED screen is hidden until it’s prompted to pop out with a key press. In this case, the laptop uses two motors that open the screen in both directions at the same time, giving you that ultrawide aspect ratio when fully extended. Besides, it is built on the Legion Pro 7i chassis, so in theory a laptop like this could have the same high-end components as that model, such as RTX 5090 graphics and the latest Intel processors.
He went up
Lenovo also announced the ThinkPad Rollable XD Concept, which repeats its previous rollable design that extends the screen vertically. It still starts with a small OLED display (now a 13.3-inch screen) and can be expanded to 16 inches with one key. This is an even more dramatic change from last year’s ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, which started at 14-inches before expanding.
Instead of hiding the additional screen of the housing folded under the hinge, this new concept gives you its use in the lid. Lenovo calls this screen “world-facing”, but it’s unclear exactly what the use case for this extra display area would be. The demo unit has some placeholder widgets but nothing is working yet.
This isn’t Lenovo’s first attempt at putting screens in a lid, but so far they’ve been open, digital ink screens that only draw power and don’t tax the battery too much. I like the look of this design better, especially being able to see the screen fold up. The problem is that it requires the webcam to sit on the side, similar to the iPad. It is definitely not a suitable place for video calls.
Both of these foldable screen computers are just concepts right now, but Lenovo has a history of actually releasing some of these new technology concepts.
Lenovo also announced the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist. This was a concept we first saw a few years ago, which uses a motorized hinge to twist the screen in any direction. This allows the device to follow you around the room during a video call and switch to tablet mode just by using a voice command. It still sounds like a small work in progress, but it shows that this proof-of-concept project is more than just innovation.
