Lenovo’s Legion Pro Rollable Gaming Laptop Goes Ultrawide at the Press of a Key
For a conventional computer company, Lenovo never fails to make a splash at CES, whether the experimental products are actually practical to use or not.
This year, the company is offering not one but two laptops with rollable OLED displays, one of which is a gaming laptop that can expand its display horizontally, adding an extra eight inches of screen real estate, all with the press of a single key.
You never knew you needed a display that could do this, but that’s exactly the kind of weird technology that CES is.
Deployment
Photography: Luke Larsen
Photography: Luke Larsen
The first rollable experience this year is the most daring, the Legion Pro Rollable Concept. It’s a 16-inch gaming laptop with a screen that can expand horizontally to a 21.5-inch “Tactical” mode, or up to a 24-inch “Arena” mode. Let’s be real: a screen much larger than the laptop’s body sounds crazy. And that requires the laptop lid to be comically thick.
But with the popularity of ultra-wide external monitors for gaming, it makes some sense. A 24-inch screen coming from the footprint of a 16-inch laptop is pretty awesome, especially if you’re someone who wants to take their gaming laptop on the go, whether that’s traveling or even just from one part of your house to another. Like the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable OLED laptop released last year, the full OLED display is hidden until it rolls up with a key press. In this case, the laptop uses two motors that unfold the screen simultaneously in both directions, giving you that ultra-wide aspect ratio when fully extended. Beyond that, it’s built on the chassis of a Legion Pro 7i, so in theory a laptop like this would feature high-end components similar to those in that model, like RTX 5090 graphics and the latest Intel processors.
To go up
Lenovo also announced the ThinkPad Rollable XD Concept, which continues its previous rollable design that extends the screen vertically. It still starts with a smaller OLED screen (this time a 13.3-inch screen) and can be expanded up to 16 inches with the press of a button. This is an even more dramatic transformation than last year’s ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, which starts at a size of 14 inches before growing.
Rather than hiding the extra screen space rolled up under the hinge, this new concept lets you use it on the lid. Lenovo calls this a “world-facing” display, but it’s unclear what the use case for this additional display area would be. The demo unit had a few dummy widgets but nothing that worked yet.
This isn’t the first time Lenovo has considered putting displays on the lid, but until now they’ve been always-on digital ink displays that only consume power and don’t put too much strain on the battery. I like the look of this design better, especially being able to see the screen wrap around the top. The problem is that the webcam must be placed on the side, much like on an iPad. It’s definitely not a great place for video calls.
These two rolling screen computers are just mere concepts at this point, but Lenovo has a history of releasing some of these flashy tech concepts.
Lenovo is also announcing the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist. This is a concept we first saw a few years ago, which uses a motorized hinge to rotate the screen in either direction. This allows the device to follow you around a room during a video call and even transform into tablet mode simply by using a voice command. This still feels like a work in progress, but it shows that these proof-of-concept projects are more than just new things.
