Lenovo unveils laptops and phones with rollable, expandable screens

Lenovo has unveiled a laptop with a display that can expand upwards, giving users more screen real estate.

Lenovo showed off the device at its Lenovo Tech World event on Tuesday, where the PC maker also unveiled a smartphone with its own expandable screen.

Lenovo showcased these products using rollable screen technology. The flexible OLED panels can be rolled up like a picture scroll, inside a smartphone or laptop, and unfolded to expand the screen.

The scrollable screen slides out so you can see more of the screen. The company says the technology promises to make multitasking on laptops easier while keeping the device itself compact.

Lenovo’s smartphones can scale in the same way, and in a demo, Lenovo executive vice president Luca Rossi showed how the product could slide out from a smaller square screen to a longer rectangular size.

“It doesn’t sacrifice screen size when you need it,” Rossi added during the presentation. “It retracts to a smaller size than any other premium smartphone.

For now, Lenovo says the two devices are just concepts, and it’s unclear if the company will mass-produce them. The main consideration is the pricing of the device and preventing rollable screen technology from facing price reductions over time due to overuse.

Last month, Samsung unveiled a similar concept device on a tablet with a rollable screen capable of extending the display from 13 inches to 17 inches. Intel also said that it hopes the PC industry will explore the use of rollable screens in more products, but the current bottleneck should be the exorbitant pricing of such products.