Lenovo’s Legion Pro rotatable gaming laptop is now massive at the push of a button

For traditional A computer company, Lenovo never fails to do so Make a splash at CESRegardless of whether the trial products are actually practical to use.

This year, the company has not one but two laptops with foldable OLED displays, one of which is a notebook Gaming laptop It can expand its screen horizontally, adding an additional eight inches of screen space – all with just the push of a button.

You never knew you needed a monitor that could do this, but it’s exactly the kind of weird technology that CES is all about.

Rolling

Photo: Luke Larsen

Photo: 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 display that can be expanded horizontally to a 21.5-inch “tactical” mode, or even a 24-inch “arena” mode. Let’s be real: a screen much wider than the laptop’s casing looks weird. And it requires the laptop cover to be comically thick.

But with popularity Ultra-wide external monitors for gamingIt has a certain amount of meaning. A 24-inch screen coming from a 16-inch laptop is pretty great especially if you’re someone who wants to take your gaming laptop on the go, whether traveling or even from one part of your home to another. Like Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 rotatable OLED In the laptop, which was introduced last year, the full OLED display is hidden until it is flipped open with the press of a key. In this case, the laptop uses two motors that open the screen in both directions simultaneously, giving you an ultra-wide aspect ratio when fully expanded. Moreover, it is built on the structure of A Legion Pro 7iSo in theory, a laptop like this would have similar high-end components to what’s in this model, like RTX 5090 graphics and the latest Intel processors.

Ascension

Lenovo also announced the ThinkPad Rollable XD concept, which replicates its previous rollable design that extends the screen vertically. It still starts with a smaller OLED display (this time a 13.3-inch display) and can be expanded up to 16 inches with the push of a button. This is a more dramatic turnaround than last year ThinkBook Plus 6th generation rotatableWhich starts at 14 inches before growing.

The back of the cover shows some of the screen as well.

Photo: Julian Chocato

Instead of hiding the extra screen space underneath the hinge, this new concept lets you use it on the lid. Lenovo calls this the “world-facing display,” but it’s not clear exactly what the use case for this extra viewing area is. The demo module has some UI placeholders but nothing works so far.

This isn’t Lenovo’s first exploration into putting displays on the lid, but until now it has been always-on digital ink displays that only consume power and don’t tax the battery too much. I like the look of this design better, especially being able to see the screen wrap around the top. The problem is that it requires the webcam to be placed on the side, like on the iPad. Definitely not the ideal place for video calls.

Both rollable-screen PCs are just concepts at this point, but Lenovo has a track record of releasing some of these flashy tech concepts.

Lenovo also announces the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist. This was a concept we first saw a few years ago, which used 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 even switch to tablet mode with just a voice command. It still feels like a work in progress, but it shows that these proof-of-concept projects are more than just novelties.