Screw Foldables: Lenovo's Rollable ThinkBook Proves There Are Better Uses for Flexible Screens

Gizmodo

11 hours ago

With a buzz and a whirl, my laptop begins to unfurl. In less than six seconds after the press of a button, my petit 14-inch ThinkBook stands erect over my desk with a taller 16.7-inch display. There is literally nothing else like Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, and that's partially why it costs a whopping $3,300. And you know what? There are few things cooler in laptop world than watching your screen expand from its original size. When you're dropping a hefty chunk of change on a laptop of this size, its benefits need to outweigh any tradeoffs. As cool the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is, when you actually use it, you'll find the joy of having a towering screen is actually one of its more annoying flaws.
Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable
It's an enormously expensive laptop with a limited gimmick. But, hey, it's the most-usable way to bring a larger screen on the go.
Pros
Cons
Normally, these kinds of 'concept' devices never leave the lab. When they do, companies bring them out for journalists and influencers to fool around with before being whisked off to gadget Elysium. Lenovo deserves credit for being ballsy enough to bring the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable to market. After all, how will we know if something may become a game changer unless we regular folk have a chance to play with it in our plebeian hands?
I'd love to encourage innovation, but a rollable device that costs more than two laptops combined needs to meet or beat what's expected from both a 14- or a 16-inch laptop, no matter which way up the screen is facing. At nearly three times the cost of other lightweight laptops, the Rollable ends up feeling weirder and occasionally more limited than a traditional device despite its neat party trick.
Despite its unique mechanism, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable houses a similar kind of screen you find on many foldable phones. These flexible displays are way thinner than the ones on other laptops, which means they can twist, bend, or—in this case—spool out several inches from the laptop's main body. There have been multiple attempts at folding laptops, including Lenovo-made devices like the ThinkPad X1 Fold 16. The Rollable feels much more like a traditional laptop—and that's to its benefit. It still functions like a laptop no matter if you're using the 14- or near-17-inch mode. Either way, the OLED panel comes with all the benefits of organic light-emitting diode screens with self-emitting light, including a high color accuracy and deep, inky blacks. The laptop even packs Dolby Vision HDR for better contrast when you're streaming your favorite shows on Netflix or Disney+. Just know the taller screen won't let you watch content much larger than usual in its normal 9:16 aspect ratio.
At the office, I prefer to work on widescreen monitors over a longer, portrait-style display. Then again, there are plenty of coders or writers who like to scroll less. There's nothing better than getting to read through an article without needing to jump to the trackpad. It also allows for multiple windows stacked on top of each other. Windows 11 already has a tiling system that makes it easy to put your apps where you want them. For some reason, Lenovo provides yet another tiling app through the device-specific software called ThinkBook Workspace. The app opens automatically when you unfurl the screen. If you use that app's specific tiling feature, it places a black bar between each app, and if you want that screen real estate back, you have to close the app. The ThinkBook Workspace includes a sometimes-handy 'Smart Copy' mode to access all your copy and pastes from your recent clipboard. It takes a little too long to load, considering most browser extensions with the same capabilities are near instantaneous.
Workspace is necessary for the Rollable due to some apps not supporting the abnormal aspect ratio. But as I found out, it also gets increasingly annoying the more you interact with it—like a rat-catching feline who tends to leave a furball on your bedspread every night. Even if you would rather do without, Workspace is not something you can easily remove through settings or the Control Panel. I gave up, and just let it be.
At first, it felt very strange to go a full workday staring at a laptop screen without any bottom bezel. When rolled out, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable sports wide bezels on top and thinner ones on the bottom. Laptop purists who demand the same size bezels all around may balk at how it looks, but it's the screen that counts most, and what's here looks very, very nice.
That's not to say there aren't many strange considerations about the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable you need to take into account. The screen doesn't tilt any further back than around 110 degrees, which—depending on the angle of your body and your sitting position—may not offer the best screen experience. The laptop won't roll out unless it's at least around 90 degrees open. If the screen is rolling and you start to fold the laptop lid, the mechanism will stop and the laptop will scream at you until you tilt it back to the correct position. You can't choose to stop the rolling mechanism while it's going. So while the laptop is technically more versatile than your typical thin and light, you won't be able to use it like you could any laptop with a screen that stays put.
The big problem with other foldable laptops is that the need for the hinge and slim body limits the space these devices usually have for larger batteries. Without enough space, laptop makers can't include more powerful processors, RAM, and all the other specs that would push the performance you need on a portable big-screen device. I experienced this lack of performance firsthand on devices like the $5,000 HP Spectre Fold and Lenovo's own $2,500 ThinkPad X1 Fold 16. The end result is a device you don't actually want to use despite being more portable. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable doesn't have that problem. It's packing an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU and the integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics. It contains all the expected specs, such as a 1TB SSD, 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 66Wh battery.
The Core Ultra Series 2 chips made their debut last year, and they're still a relatively strong option on small, portable machines. I found the Intel Core Ultra 258V behaved as well as can be expected when the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable was plugged in on performance mode. There's no real performance loss between using the device in a 14-inch or 16-inch mode, at least when it's sucking down power from an outlet. The Intel Core Ultra 258V keeps pace at or just below chips like AMD's AI 7 350 in CPU-heavy tasks with the device firing on all cylinders. For graphics tasks, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable still won't be your laptop of choice even with Intel's built-in Arc 140V GPU. If it's benchmarks you want, the M4 chip found on Apple's MacBooks still wins out.
It's when using the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable off battery power that the larger screen added more than a few hiccups. I had positioned two Chrome browsers on top of each other with around a dozen tabs each, and the PC would occasionally glitch, blurring text on the southern part of the screen. Other times, one of the Chrome windows blacked out randomly.
The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable also leads to strange circumstances with some apps. This isn't a laptop meant for gaming, but I decided to load a few on it for kicks. Lightweight games like Hades defaulted to 2,000 x 2,352 resolution and sat in the middle of the 16.7-inch screen. Tactical Breach Wizards maintained the same resolution but extended the display from end-to-end. I don't know how many games support this extra-long aspect ratio, but I've never experienced anything quite like it on a laptop.
The latest Intel chips are more efficient than previous-gen ones, though that doesn't mean laptops like the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable are truly all-day devices. Even without running the motors to winch open the screen, I only ever got around 5.5 hours of battery life, at most. Naturally, with the screen unfurled to its full height, the battery will necessarily drain faster than using the 14-inch screen. If I were limiting use and running on battery-saving mode, I could push the device to last a full day's work. But why would I, considering this is a device made for multitasking beyond anything else?
Thin and light laptops have been trending thinner and lighter, but when clammed up, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable feels like a device from another time. It slides effortlessly into a backpack's laptop sleeve and you can carry it around with one hand, though not as easily as you may want to thanks to its 3.72 pounds and bulky chassis. What that extra heft implies is that the device is supremely sturdy. There's no keyboard flex to speak of. My palms felt like they were rising on a bed made of inch-thick aluminum. That build quality also translates to other parts of the device, though I can't speak for how long the display's motors or flexible screen will last long term with constant scrolling, daily. It survived more than a week's worth of back and forth to the office, but I can't say what will happen in several months' time.
If you're spending over $3,000 on a laptop, you want it to be top of the line in every other way than just the screen. It's a good thing the keyboard offers a smooth and responsive typing experience. The haptic trackpad has a similar high-quality responsiveness, where every click has the same satisfying feeling of popping bubble wrap. The design seems copied straight from Lenovo's Chromebook Plus 14 that I reviewed last month—and yes, that's a good thing. It's the kind of low-profile keyboard and trackpad I could tap all day long.
For its size, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is packing hefty speakers. The twin Harman Kardon speakers blast sound out both the left and right sides of the laptop. It's not enough to fill a room or shudder your bowels with extreme bass, but they can get relatively loud. The audio on the average Netflix movie sounds clear enough that I wasn't immediately reaching for a pair of quality earbuds or headphones.
Even with an extended display, I still felt the need to connect an external monitor whether I was working in the office or at home. In this kind of setup, the 16.7-inch screen is a godsend for a writer like me. At the same time, the Rollable is only packing a pair of Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports on the left side of the device. You'll end up needing a port dock close at hand. Considering its thick size, you would expect to find an HDMI port or more I/O, but the Rollable's thicker body is made to house the rolling screen apparatus.
Companies keep trying to find ways to make laptop screens bigger without expanding the size of the laptop itself. We've seen and tested our fair share of multi-display bolt-ons, like the Xebec Snap, the Aura Triple Laptop Display, or Lenovo's separate clip-on concept monitor. When you lay out the long line of failures, Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is the best attempt at extended screens yet. If it weren't for the annoying software and compatibility issues, I would be left with a black hole where the money in my wallet used to be. The only thing that could fill that hole would be the tenuous sense of optimism that the screen or rolling mechanism would continue working for months or years down the road. I could only keep that upbeat attitude going for so long. The thought of my $3,300 laptop breaking is enough to have me roll up on my back with my legs and arms as erect as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, like a cockroach about to croak.