Lenovo Legion Pro Rollable and ThinkPad Rollable XD concepts

Last year Lenovo used a foldable OLED display in their ThinkBook Plus pro-series notebook. This is a 14-inch chassis with a display that stretches up to 16.7 inches tall.

This year, they are showing foldable OLED technology in a few more products in the very popular Legion and ThinkPad families.

These devices are conceptual at the moment, and Lenovo has not specified when or if they will implement the technology into actual products that we can buy in stores. But I think that should happen in a year or two.

Legion Pro 7i Rollable

So what they are showing you is a full-featured 16-inch gaming laptop based on the Legion Pro 7i chassis with a display that can be stretched on the sides all the way to 24 inches (21:9 format). Having a large widescreen display on this type of laptop is exciting to say the least, and it’s more practical for real-world use than the ThinkBook (and ThinkPad XD concepts we’ll talk about in a bit).

Here are some pictures of this Legion Pro Rollable design.

And a video showing how this rollable display works (it also shows a ThinkPad XD).

By default, the 16-inch Legion Pro 7i with excellent specifications (Core Ultra 9 HX CPU, up to full Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, expandable RAM and SSDs, 99 Wh battery, advanced vapor chamber cooling), is one of the best 16-inch notebooks that can be bought today. If you’re interested, our full review of the Legion Pro 7i is available here, and our review of the larger 18-inch Legion 9i is also available here.

But the display on this Legion Pro Rollable unit expands to the left and right, to a 21.5-inch wide screen or a 24-inch ultra-wide 21:9 format. This allows enough work space for everyday use and creative work, but also creates a large display for watching movies and playing games.

The obvious tradeoff is a larger display with more complex moving parts. Less obvious is that the screen isn’t completely flat; it has some creases on the side edges, visible (check the video) both when the display is in its default 16-inch “closed” state, but also when rolled to wide formats. At least that’s the current state of the technology, which would have to be sorted out before this goes into actual production.

That said, at the moment, the exact details of this OLED panel or the required method for this type of implementation is still a work in progress. But the idea of ​​this kind of rollable display intrigues me, even more than the foldable OLED that Lenovo sampled in the past on the ThinkPad X1 Fold (with less success).

However, I expect that reliability will play an important role in the potential performance of this concept in a real product, and the price will be important as well, but that is a secondary concern. We’ll update this story as we know more about the actual Legion notebook with the Rollable OLED display.

ThinkPad Rollable XD

This ThinkPad Rollable XD concept is a further iteration of the flexible OLED used in the ThinkBook launched last year, in what looks like a premium 13.3-inch ThinkPad aluminum chassis.

But in this case, the display actually covers the lid of the laptop, which means that another display is always visible when the device is closed, to show widgets or notifications or other applications that you would like to follow when the laptop is closed (is there such a use case, anyway?). Therefore, without the possibility of expanding your work area vertically to the size of 16 inches, this concept wraps the display in the lid to be able to provide some information when the laptop is closed; the top of the laptop, where the screen flips to the lid, is also touch sensitive and can include controls.

That, however, means that the display is always exposed to the laptop’s lid, and the device will need more care when being carried and put in a bag. That’s strange for a ThinkPad that’s supposed to be a business laptop, it’s more durable and reliable than a regular machine. And I wonder if the flexible OLEDs are strong enough to be exposed like that, even if the entire lid is covered with a protective glass that should keep the flexible panel safe. We’ll see if this concept develops from here.

That flexible OLED is on the side of the Legion, however, I’d really like to see that in real products at some point, when the technology is ready for mass use. And I wouldn’t dismiss the functionality of the expandable rear display on the ThinkPad either, although that’s useless on a 14-inch panel that might stretch to a shorter 18-19-inch ultra-wide. Thoughts?

Before we wrap this up, I also have to acknowledge Lenovo’s effort to push notebooks forward with these concepts. Flexible foldable OLEDs have been popularly used in phones for years now, and it’s about time we got the technology to laptops as well.

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