- So the last time I was at Mobile World Congress
in Barcelona in 2019,
foldables were the new hotness in town.
Samsung had announced but not released its first Galaxy Fold
and Huawei also had a foldable of its own, the Mate X.
But that was four years and one pandemic ago.
And in 2023, Lenovo is looking ahead to rollables.
(lively music)
So today we've had a firsthand look
at a pair of rollable devices from Lenovo.
There's a rollable phone and a rollable laptop
and both of these they showed off in a video last October.
Now, it's worth emphasizing that both
of these are very early concept devices
and Lenovo isn't ready to talk
about pricing or release dates just yet.
I didn't even get a chance to hold the devices for myself
but both of them are a really interesting look
at how transforming screens might influence the future
of both phones and laptops alike.
Let's start with a laptop because honestly,
it's unlike anything I've ever seen before.
The first thing to note about Lenovo's concept laptop,
which it's just calling its rollable laptop for now
is just how unassuming its appearance is.
I mean, you really have no idea
what this thing is capable of
until it starts on rolling.
And a group of us journalists just walked straight past it
at first thinking it was just one
of Lenovo's other 12.7 inch laptops
with a four by three aspect ratio display.
That all changes with a flip
of a small switch on the right ofthe chassis
at which point you can hear some motors worrying
and the screen extends upwards.
What's happening here is the screen
is kind of being pulled out
from underneath the laptop's keyboard
and being displayed more or less vertically.
It's a kind of slow process
on this concept device that took maybe over 10 seconds
but eventually, you're left
with an almost square 15.3 inch display
with an eight by nine aspect ratio.
It's a little bit like LG's fancy rollable TV
that can roll down into a little box
when you're not using it.
Only here, the screen is disappearing into the keyboard
and it also doesn't entirely fold away.
There's a small crease visible
when the screen's fully extended, but again,
it's a prototype.
In terms of resolution,
the display is 2,024 by 1,604 when unextended
and 2,024 by 20,
I'm just gonna put it up on screen.
Oh yeah, of course.
Yeah, 2,368 when fully extended.
But basically the takeaway is that it's pretty usable
without having to fully extend the display.
The screen is applied by Sharp,
which Lenovo has previously worked with
on its ThinkPad X1 Foldable.
Also, in terms of why you might want a laptop
that can do this,
other than it just being cool as hell,
think of an eight by nine display's kind
of like being two 16 by nine displays on top of each other,
which is great news
for anyone like me who really struggles to work
on just a single laptop display
and has been tempted multiple times
to buy a laptop just to use
as a secondary MacBook display.
So the setup might be useful for coders to see more lines
of text or for office workers to see more cells in Excel
or content creators who can see more content.
It would definitely be useful
for me being able to have a video script in the bottom half
of the screen and interview notes in the top half.
Plenty of people like to use vertical monitors
with their desktop PCs, so clearly it's a useful form factor
and Windows' app windowing support
can handle pretty much whatever weird screen sizes
you throw at it.
Okay, so the elephant in the room
is that Lenovo isn't ready to talk
about releasing this as a consumer device.
And the more questions I asked about it,
the better of an idea I got about why.
I asked about durability and Lenovo said
that it would like to get to a point
where it's in the same ballpark as it's Fold X1
where it could survive maybe 20 to 30,000 folds
but it doesn't sound like it's there yet.
I admit that that doesn't sound
like much compared to the hundreds of thousands
of folds that foldable smartphones are typically rated for.
But I guess with a laptop, you tend to open
and close it far fewer times a day
rather than every single time you want
to check your messages.
There're also questions about weight and battery life.
Now, Lenovo wouldn't tell me how much this thing weighs
and they also wouldn't let me pick it up.
Trust me, I asked.
And then in terms of battery life,
apparently the rollable mechanism draws maybe a couple
of watts of power, which doesn't sound like that much
but I don't love it
in an era where laptops sometimes still struggle to get
through a full day's worth of use.
That said, Lenovo is one
of the few laptop manufacturers to have actually
gotten an affordable laptop out the door.
It released its original ThinkPad X1 Fold
in 2020 and it announced a follow-up last year.
So I think if it's showing off prototypes,
there's at least some chance this might make it
to a consumer release.
I think it's fair to say this company
isn't afraid to experiment with new laptop concepts.
So fingers crossed this rollable concept
gets the same treatment.
Now, Lenovo's other device is a rollable smartphone.
Now, there have been plenty of concept devices shown off
over the years in various stages of development
by the likes of Samsung Display, TCL and Oppo.
But when it comes to devices
that are actually available to buy,
it's basically foldables.
Anyway, like a foldable,
the idea is that a rollable smartphone can be small
when you need it to be portable
and big when you need it to be, well, big.
Oppo's rollable concept used
its expanding screen to turn
from a rectangle into more of a square.
But Lenovo's phone,
which it's calling the Motorola rollable smartphone concept,
it's all about taking a small square
of a display and making it longer.
It's functionally kind of like a foldable flip phone
but where you don't need a secondary cover display
because it's the same screen the entire time.
So here you're looking at a small five inch display
with a 15 by nine aspect ratio
when the phone's in its compact mode,
and then with a small double tap of the side button,
the screen unfurls to give you a full 6.5 inch display
with a 22 by nine aspect ratio.
It's pretty damn tall.
Now Lenovo gets a lot
of mileage out of this simple seeming design.
There's the obvious stuff like being able
to watch a video in its native aspect ratio
with no black bars
or getting a bigger screen when you go to compose an email.
Lenovo's idea is the screen will dynamically adjust
depending on which app you're using
and it hopes that the final version
will let its users as customize exactly
how big they want the screen to be
for each app.
But there are also a couple of features
of the Motorola concept
that weren't immediately apparent.
So for starters, that screen,
when it's rolling down the bottom,
it's not actually disappearing into the chassis,
it's rolling around to the rear of the phone.
So Lenovo says you might want to use this
as a viewfinder when you're taking selfies
with the rear cameras
and even had a little demo where the rear display
played cute eye-catching animations to get a child to look
at the phone when you want to take a photo of them.
Another cool touch is that the display
can hide the selfie camera
and earpiece only to reveal them when you make a call
or gotta take a selfie.
Like with the laptop,
it's a concept device and there are plenty
of questions that Lenovo didn't have answers to.
There was no word on how durable it might be,
how many rolls it might survive.
There was no details on price
or when this thing might actually release.
And in our briefing at least,
Lenovo didn't offer us a chance
to try the device for ourselves.
It was very much a hands-off experience.
But like with the laptop,
I think there's a non-zero chance
this might actually one day make it into public hands.
And remember, Lenovo's already put out a foldable
in the form of the Motorola Razr.
Maybe a rollable's next.
In 2019, we asked whether foldable phones were the future
but now I'd love to know is there a space
in the foldable future
for a couple of cheeky little Lenovo rollables?
Thanks so much for watching, guys.
We need to roll the ball
along to our next briefing here in Barcelona.
But you know, keep an eye on the site.
We've got plenty of news.
That's terrible.
(director laughing)
Thank you so much for watching, guys.
Thank you so much for watching.
Thank you.
We gotta rollable along to our next briefing
at MWC Barcelona.
Let's keep an eye on the site
for all of the top news from this year's show.
- [Director] Just 'cause you're shouting the pun louder
doesn't make it work more.