Laptop users who need extra display real estate while out and about can now simply push a button or wave a hand. Lenovo’s 2022 concept laptop was made real at CES earlier this year, and now the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is on sale.
The ThinkBook series has always pushed novel envelopes, starting in 2019 with an E Ink cover with stylus input, then a secondary display next to the keyboard followed by a fold-over hinge that allowed the laptop to be used like a tablet, and another where the display could detach from the keyboard base.
All well and good, and innovative when they were first demonstrated, but the Generation 6 concept shown at Tech World 2022 topped them all. Users would start with a highly portable 14-inch ThinkBook. If they found themselves needing more screen, a dedicated key on the keyboard would activate a mechanism that rolled up the display to 16.7 diagonal inches.
The user could also stand away from the laptop and use simple hand gestures captured by the bezel-cam to extend or reduce the available real estate. Lenovo partnered with Intel to bring the concept into the real world, and following more than 2 years of engineering it was launched at CES 2025.
Lenovo
The design called for a smaller printed circuit board to be developed, along with a reorganization of other internal components to free up space – all of which allowed the designers to incorporate a pair of tiny motors into the chassis, which push up the rollable OLED display and pull it back down.
“We engineered all the thermal technology and power control to happen inside the Intel Core Ultra system-on-chip dynamic thermal tuning tool, or DTT,” said Intel’s Zheng Jiong. “We worked with Lenovo to apply these technologies to control the thermal and manage the power. Then, in an industry first, we customized the Intel graphics driver software in a way to create the very smooth screen transition.”
Lenovo
For readers who missed our earlier coverage, this adaptable ThinkBook features Intel Core Ultra 7 processing brains with integrated graphics and neural processing chops capable of 48 trillion operations per second. System support comes in the shape of 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of SSD storage.
When at 14 inches, the 400-nit display has a resolution of 2,000 x 1,600 pixels at 5:4 aspect – but that changes to 2,000 x 2,350 pixels at 8:9 aspect when fully rolled out. There’s Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, USB-C Thunderbolt, a 5-megapixel RGB camera plus an IR camera with privacy shutter, dual-array microphones, Harmon Kardon speakers, and a 66-Wh battery that supports rapid charging.
The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is certified to MIL-STD-810H durability standards, and is available now for a starting price of US$3,299. You can catch up with a CES overview from the company’s Vico Song via Lenovo’s Facebook page.
Product page: Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable
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