CES 2025: You’ll actually be able to buy Lenovo’s rollable laptop this year
Want more screen space on your laptop? Lenovo’s latest innovation could well have the answer
Every year, Lenovo unveils an outlandish concept device or two, and some of them even make it to the shelves. Never in my wildest dreams, however, did I expect its laptop with a rollable extending screen to be available to buy.
Don’t get me wrong, it was certainly an interesting idea and a more elegant alternative to twin-screen or big-screen foldables, but it just looked too complicated and fragile to ever make it to market.
But here it is, dubbed rather blandly the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, and it doesn’t look all that different to the machine we saw a couple of years ago during MWC 2023.
Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable: Specifications, price, availability
- 14-16.7in rollable OLED display, 400 nits, 100% DCI-P3
- Up to Intel Core Ultra 7 processor (Series 2)
- Intel Arc Xe2
- Up to 32GB RAM
- Up to 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
- 5MP webcam with IR and electronic privacy shutter
- 66Wh battery
- Dimensions: 303 x 230 x 19.9mm (WDH)
- Weight: 1.69kg
- Price: From 2,799 Euros
- Availability: From August (EU)
Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable: Design and first impressions
Despite the exotic tech inside, it does at first glance look like a regular Lenovo ThinkBook laptop. It comes in a two-tone grey/silver finish, ports are scattered around the edges of the chassis in the usual fashion, and the keyboard and touchpad both look totally normal. The latter is a fancy haptic unit but those are becoming quite common on upmarket Windows machines.
Open the lid and you’ll see a Windows Hello-compatible 5-megapixel IR webcam embedded in a slightly raised unit above a 14in OLED display. The whole thing folds up in a relatively slim, compact package that measures 303 x 230 x 19.9mm (WDH) and weighs 1.69kg.
Press a button, or wave your hand in front of the camera, however, and motors within the body of the laptop kick in, pushing the screen upwards slowly but steadily until a larger display is fully unfurled.
This larger screen measures 16.7in across the diagonal and comes with proprietary Lenovo software – ThinkBook Workspace – to help you make the most of the extra screen space with split screen and widget features. Lenovo’s Virtual Display software, meanwhile, allows users to treat the single display as twin monitors instead of just one monolithic display.
The display tech behind this incredible extending screen is a flexible OLED touch-capable panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, 400 nits peak brightness and 100% DCI-P3 colour coverage – so it should look vibrant and readable in most lighting conditions. There may well be some distortion due to the fact that the display has to fold when it’s stowed away, however.
The rest of the specification sheet reveals a pretty standard-looking, albeit premium, laptop. Inside, it’s powered by one of Intel’s latest Core Ultra 7 (Series 2) processors with integrated Arc Xe2 graphics. This is backed up by up to 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of SSD storage. There’s support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 and the lights are kept on by a 66Wh battery. Lenovo also says the laptop will have MIL-STD-810H military-grade testing certification but this is “pending”.
I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these exotic machines for a full, thorough review. However, I do wonder how many people will commit to buying one, and it’s going to be some time before it arrives.
The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable won’t reach EU shops until August and it’s going to cost a pretty penny – from 2,799 Euros excluding VAT – so reckon on around £3,000 when it reaches the UK.
