Look how tall it is. | Image: Lenovo
In a promotional video for its Tech World 2022 event, Lenovo showed off a laptop with what appears to be a rollable screen. In a brief working demo, you can see the screen of what appears to be an old-school notebook slowly begin to rise from the keyboard deck, unfurling into a display that is monstrously, disconcertingly tall.
My initial impression is that this thing looks a bit… tall. It’s not clear from the video whether I could stop the screen anywhere I wanted in the progression or whether I’d need to fully unroll it every time. It’s also not clear exactly how tall the display gets. Eyeballing the video, it looks like the display gains an additional 50 percent or so in height, meaning it might grow from 9-ish to 13.5-ish inches tall. (You’re welcome for the math, everyone.)
I do slightly worry about how much this thing would weigh. All that extra screen needs to live inside the keyboard deck, presumably, and that’s a bunch of extra mass to be carrying around.
On the other hand: look how cool this is! There’s no doubt I could fit way more things on this screen than I can on, say, the 13-inch ThinkPad I’m typing this on. In its ideal form, this could be a sneaky way to carry around a secondary monitor (without some of the, well, space problems that actual dual-screen laptops currently have).
You can see the demo about 53 seconds in:
Of course, this is just a concept, so it’s not at all clear that this laptop will ever be an actual thing. (Motorola also showed off a rollable concept phone at the event, which seems similarly far away.) Given that Lenovo hasn’t quite gotten its second-gen foldable laptop off the ground yet, it seems like it will be a while before any kind of rollable becomes a viable purchase.
Still, if there’s one thing we could all use more of these days, it’s hope for a brighter future. And I do enjoy thinking of how much fun it would be to scroll through tweets on this bad boy.