This portable Windows gaming device has a screen that folds in half

Lenovo has put a foldable screen on its gaming laptop. The Legion Go Fold Concept is a Windows laptop with a flexible POLED display, detachable Joy-Con-like controllers, and a foldable case to turn the whole thing into a mini laptop.

You can use it as a standard handheld Steam Deck with the screen folded down to 7.7 inches and controllers attached to its sides, or you can open it up for a larger experience. When opened, the controllers can be repositioned on all four sides, allowing you to play with the screen in portrait or landscape orientations.

In vertical split-screen mode, you can place your game on one half of the screen and a second window (such as chat or game guide) on the other half. Horizontal full-screen mode gives your game a full 11.6 inches of space with a 16:10 aspect ratio. To transition into laptop mode, you can remove the controllers and install the mobile device in a foldable case with a stand and built-in keyboard and trackpad. The controllers can be placed in a separate stand to unify them as a single gamepad.

There are plenty of ways you can use this foldable laptop, including converting one of its controllers into a vertical mouse like other Legion Go laptops, but there’s one thing it doesn’t do: fold down to enclose and protect its screen. The Go Fold only folds outward, so don’t expect a Nintendo DS or GameBoy Advance-like clamshell that closes for easy transport. Instead, it’s all about going bigger than your average mobile gamer and offering more. (Nevertheless We tried greater before.)

The Legion Go Fold has some massive specs: an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Lunar Lake processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and a 48Wh battery. The plastic-covered OLED display has a resolution of 2435 x 1712 and a refresh rate of 165Hz. There’s also a second circular touchscreen on the right controller, below the face buttons. It also acts as a touchpad and can be a support screen, allowing you to swipe between UI elements extracted from a game (which I don’t expect to be widely supported), a clock, a system monitor, or an animated GIF (just for fun).

During the short personal demo, I wasn’t able to play any graphically intensive games – just that BalatroWhich can practically play on potatoes. The screen looked very sharp, but like any foldable screen, there is a crease in the middle; It’s very visible, but you learn to look past it and ignore it after a while. The build and feel of everything seemed a bit shaky, and disconnecting and reconnecting the controllers was definitely annoying. Hopefully the build quality will be improved if this device actually comes to market.

The laptop mode was a pleasant surprise for me though. I didn’t expect a portable gaming device to double in size as a traditional PC that you can get work done on. The Legion Go Fold case took a fair amount of fumbling before I got it set up correctly, but it shouldn’t take long to get used to if you already live with it.

And again, I don’t know if anyone is going to be able to live with this thing – ever. I’d love for the Legion Go Fold to go from concept to actual product like Lenovo’s other ideas, but I shudder to think how much it might have cost. the Legion Go 2 Its price is already over $1000. And with The ongoing Ramageddon crisis We live byThere’s no telling how much the actual Legion Go Fold will cost if it comes out in a year or more.

But even if it’s not the kind of foldable you expected, and even though it may never appear, it’s certainly cool. Now, I hope someone makes a foldable laptop that goes from large to very small. I think this would be the one for me.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge