In a promotional video for the Tech World 2022 event, Lenovo showed off a laptop with what appears to be a roll-up screen. In a short working demo, you can see how the screen of what looks like an old-school notebook begins to slowly rise from the keyboard and unfold to a screen that is monstrously, unsettlingly tall.
My first impression is that this thing looks a little… long. It’s not clear from the video if I could stop the screen in progress wherever I wanted or if I had to completely unroll it every time. It is also not clear how high the screen will be. Watching the video, it looks like the screen is going to get another 50 percent taller, meaning it can grow from 9-ish to 13.5-ish inches tall. (You’re welcome for the math, everyone.)
I’m a little concerned about how much this thing would weigh. All that extra screen must presumably live in the keyboard deck, and that’s a lot of extra bulk to carry around.
On the other hand, look how cool this is! There’s no question that I could fit a lot more things on this screen than I could 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 issues that real dual-screen laptops currently have).
You can watch the demo for about 53 seconds in:
Of course, this is just a concept, so it’s not at all clear that this laptop will ever be a real thing. (Motorola also showed a concept rollable phone at the event, which also seems a long way off.) Since Lenovo hasn’t quite got its second-generation foldable laptop off the ground yet, it looks like it’s going to be a while before some sort of rollable one becomes available. feasible purchase.
But if there’s one thing we could all use more of this time, it’s hope for a brighter future. And I like to think how much fun it would be to scroll through tweets about this bad boy.