Lenovo Teases Rolling Screens For Laptops and Phones—Here's the Scoop

It is no secret that flexible displays are coming sooner rather than later, and Lenovo just showed off a unique application for the technology.

The company just unveiled a pair of rollable gadgets, a smartphone and a laptop, that use flexible display tech to magically shrink and grow the screens. To the layperson, the device looks to be changing shape, and this is not far from the truth. The flexible screens are merely moving and folding in on one another to create the illusion. 

First up, the roll-up Motorola smartphone starts at a pocket-friendly 4-inches high but clicking a single button extends the OLED screen to the traditional smartphone height of 6.5-inches. One more click retracts the phone back to its original size. The company notes that it is fully useable in both sizes and that content adapts to the screen. 

Lenovo also unveiled a rollable laptop design. The demo shows the laptop starting in a standard landscape display. A push of a button, however, rolls the screen up to a larger square shape better suited for documents or vertical TikTok videos. 

Lenovo VP of design Brian Leonard affirms that the laptop "can expand into a much larger screen" and that the content "dynamically adjusts" to this screen to offer users "an unprecedented way of hyper-tasking for productivity." 

The bad news? These are prototype devices for now, though Lenovo is not ruling out a proper release. After all, the company and its mobile division, Motorola, already manufacture a folding smartphone, the Razr.