Table of Contents
Last year Lenovo implemented a rollable OLED display in their ThinkBook Plus pro-series notebook. This is a 14-inch chassis with a display that expands vertically to a taller 16.7 inches.
This year, they’re showcasing the rollable OLED technology in a few more products in the more popular Legion and ThinkPad families.
These devices are concepts for the time being, and Lenovo did not specify when or if they’ll actually implement the technologies in real products that we could buy in stores. But I’d reckon that should happen in a year or two.
Legion Pro 7i Rollable
So what they showcased is a full-performance 16-inch gaming laptop based on a Legion Pro 7i chassis with a display that can expand sideways all the way to 24 inches (21:9 format). Having a large wide-screen display on this sort of laptop is exciting to say the least, and far more practical for real use than the vertical implementation in the ThinkBook (and the ThinkPad XD concepts that we’ll discuss in a bit).
Here are some images of this Legion Pro Rollable design.
And a video showcasing how this rollable display works (and showcasing the ThinkPad XD as well).
By default, it’s a 16-inch Legion Pro 7i with excellent specs (Core Ultra 9 HX CPU, up to a full Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, expandable RAM and SSDs, 99 Wh battery, advanced vapor-chamber cooling), one of the better existing performance 16-inch notebooks money can buy today. If interested, our full-review of the Legion Pro 7i is available over here, and our review of the larger 18-inch Legion 9i is available here as well.
But then the display on this Legion Pro Rollable unit expands to the left and right, to either a wide 21.5-inch screen or a 24-inch ultra-wide 21:9 format. This allows for an ample workspace for everyday use and creative work, but also creates a larger display for watching movies and playing games.
The obvious tradeoff is a thicker display with complex moving parts. The less obvious is the fact that the screen isn’t entirely flat; it has some creases around the lateral edges, visible (check out the video) both when having the display in its default 16-inch “closed” state, but also when rolled onto the wider formats. At least that’s the current state of the technology, which would need to be sorted out before this gets into a real product.
That means, at this point, the exact details of this OLED panel or the mechanism required for this sort of implementation are still a work in progress. But the idea of this sort of rollable display is intriguing to me, even more than of the folding OLED that Lenovo sampled a while ago on the ThinkPad X1 Fold (with little success).
However, I expect reliability to play a crucial role in the potential viability of this concept in a real product, and pricing is going to matter as well, but that’s a secondary concern. We’ll develop this story as we know more about a potential real Legion notebook with a Rollable OLED display.
ThinkPad Rollable XD
This ThinkPad Rollable XD concept is a further iteration of the vertical expanding OLED implemented in the ThinkBook launched last year, in what looks like a premium 13.3-inch ThinkPad aluminum chassis.
But this time around, the display actually wraps over across the laptop’s lid as well, which means some of the display remains visible when having the device closed, to showcase widgets or notifications or some apps that you’d perhaps want to keep track of when the laptop is closed (is there such a use case, though?). So, besides the possibility of expanding your workspace vertically to about a 16-inch size, this concept rolls the display onto the lid so it can offer some information when the laptop is closed; the top of the laptop, where the screen rolls over to the lid, is touch-sensitive as well and can integrate controls.
That, however, means the display remains exposed on the laptop’s lid, and the device would require extra care when handled and tucked away in a bag. That’s rather weird on a ThinkPad that’s supposedly a business laptop, tougher and more reliable than a regular device. And I wonder if rollable OLEDs are tough enough to be exposed like that, even if the entire lid is actually covered in protective glass that should keep the flexible panel safe. We’ll see whether this concept develops further from here.
That sideways rollable OLED on the Legion, though, I’d surely want to see that in real products at some point, when the technology is ready for mass use. And I wouldn’t dismiss the viability of a lateral expanding display on a ThinkPad as well, although that’s arguably not as useful on a 14-inch panel that would perhaps expand to a rather short 18-19-inch ultra-wide. Thoughts?
Before we wrap this up, I must also acknowledge Lenovo’s effort in pushing notebooks further with these concepts. Flexible folding OLEDs have been popularly implemented on phones for years now, and it’s about time we get the technology on laptops as well.
