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Tom's Guide
5 days ago
- Tom's Guide
I spent 48 hours with Lenovo's rollable laptop — and it genuinely blew my mind
I've tested several of the best laptops over the years, and the new Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is easily the most unique one yet. Its name might give away its main feature, but most people likely won't know what a 'rollable' laptop is without further explanation. I know I didn't when I first heard about this concept notebook two years ago. Well, Lenovo's rollable laptop is no longer a concept, as a review unit just arrived at our office a couple of days ago. We got to check out Lenovo's first rollable laptop at CES 2025, but I only gave it a cursory glance since my focus was on the Lenovo Legion Go S at that time. Now that I've had the chance to go hands-on with this rollable laptop, I can tell you that it's unlike anything I've ever tested — and I mean that in the best way possible. I'll have a full review of the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable for you soon, but for now, I wanted to share my initial thoughts, as this is a truly distinctive laptop. Though it's definitely strange (and very expensive), it's not something we should dismiss as gimmicky. In fact, it could be exactly what you need to boost your productivity. The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable features a 14-inch 120Hz OLED panel that can expand to 16.7 inches to boost your productivity. Inside, it packs an Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Though very expensive, this could be the ideal laptop if you don't want to carry an external display for more screen real estate. As I mentioned earlier, not everyone is familiar with rollable devices. As a result, I'll provide a brief summary to help you understand what Lenovo's rollable laptop is. A rollable device uses a flexible display that allows the screen to be extended or retracted by rolling it in and out of a housing, usually through a motorized mechanism. You can think of it like a window shade or even a scroll. As we explained in our Foldable phones vs. rollable phones piece, this technology differs from that of foldable phones, which fold in half. For the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, a portion of the display is inside the laptop. At the press of a button on the keyboard deck, the laptop's display rolls upward, extending the 120Hz OLED panel from 14 to 16.7 inches. You can even hear the motor whirr as the display extends or retracts, which is something I didn't originally hear on the busy CES show floor. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. Now that we know how this laptop functions, let's get into what it's like using it. I probably shouldn't admit this as a tech journalist, but it's easy to become jaded about technology after you've tested hundreds of devices. The magic of testing something new is a feeling that's sometimes hard to recapture. I didn't expect to be surprised by the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable since I had already seen it at CES. Then I spent a good five minutes doing nothing but pressing the button that makes the display extend and retract. That might sound silly, but trust me, seeing the screen go up and down brings back that old magic I spoke about. You'd have to be one super jaded person to think this rollable function isn't one of the coolest things you've seen. It'll put a smile on your face. Cool factor aside, having such a comically long display is actually beneficial for work. With the extra 50% screen real estate, you can scroll long pages or documents more efficiently than you would on a 16:9 or 16:10 display. You can have two (or more) apps on top of each other, which can be useful if you don't have an external display. Getting into specifics, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable effectively has two display modes. The primary one is 14 inches with a 2000 x 1600 resolution and a 5:4 aspect ratio. In extended mode, the screen is 16.7 inches with a 2000 x 2350 resolution with an 8:9 aspect ratio. Those resolutions and aspect ratios aren't the norm for laptops, but whether it's rolled in or out, everything on the display appears sharp and vibrant. Based on my time so far, I haven't been disappointed by this laptop's performance. Thanks to its Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU, 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD, it easily handles my average workflow. It also performed well in the Geekbench CPU benchmark. I'll have a full account of its performance in my upcoming review. The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is undeniably unique, but it's certainly not perfect. With the understanding that I'm still testing this laptop, I've already noted some flaws that could be detrimental in both the long and short term. And I'm not just talking about the steep $3,299 asking price. Measuring 11.9 x 9.08 x 0.75 (when rolled in and closed) and weighing 3.7 pounds, Lenovo's rollable laptop isn't too large or heavy. However, it's noticeably thicker than even a 14-inch MacBook Pro M4, which is 0.61 inches thick. I'm not surprised at the laptop's thickness, given that it needs room for the display to roll into. But if you're looking for a thin laptop, this one isn't it. Another thing I'm not enamored with is the inconsistency of using hand gestures to roll and unroll the display. You're supposed to place an open hand near the laptop's webcam and wait for an on-screen icon of a hand being scanned before you move your hand up or down for the appropriate action. However, this doesn't always work, if it even works at all. Maybe I'll eventually nail this action, but right now, let's just say I'm glad there's a button so I don't have to rely on gestures to roll and unroll the display. Lastly, there's the question of durability. When we asked Lenovo, a company rep told us that this laptop's display is rated for around 20,000 opens. That might sound like a lot, but keep in mind that foldable phones like the Galaxy Z Fold 6 are rated for 250,000 opens. However, since you might not constantly extend the display like you would on a phone, 20,000 opens might be more than enough. Still, durability is something that could eventually be an issue. Lenovo is always willing to try something innovative, as we've seen with the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 that we've reviewed. That's why I can appreciate what the company is doing with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable. Yes, it's expensive and strange, but it can also be the ideal laptop for folks who travel a lot and don't want to lug an external monitor around to get more screen space. Again, I'll have a full review of the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, as well as additional related content, so stay tuned! 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Gizmodo
04-08-2025
- Gizmodo
Screw Foldables: Lenovo's Rollable ThinkBook Proves There Are Better Uses for Flexible Screens
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.
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Lenovo gave its latest 16-inch ThinkBook a bevy of funky concept screen accessories
The ThinkBook line has sort of become Lenovo's de facto testing ground for far-out ideas and ambitious concepts. See the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable we saw just a couple months ago at CES. But at MWC 2025, the company is pushing things further than ever through the new ThinkBook 16p Gen 6 and four of its display accessories — which range from practical add-ons to something that's more like a Tamagotchi. The ThinkBook 16P powering all of Lenovo's crazy concept accessories isn't all that different from the company's previous 16-inch workstations. It sports up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 2785HX chip with as much as 64GB of RAM, 2TB of PCIe storage and an NVIDIA RTX 5070 GPU. You get the choice of either a 3.2K IPS display with a 165Hz refresh rate or a slightly lower-res 2.5K IPS panel with a faster 240Hz refresh. There's also plenty of connectivity including dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, three USB-A jacks, a full-size HDMI 2.1 and a card reader. One interesting addition is that Lenovo included a discrete NPU (separate from its main chip) that offers up to 32 TOPS of additional performance. This should provide a nice boost, particularly for anyone who needs to run demanding AI tasks locally. That said, for the rest of us lay folk, it's largely unnecessary. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. However, the real spectacle is Lenovo's assortment of accessories. They all connect to the ThinkBook 16P using the company's Magic Bay docking system, which was first introduced to this product family a couple generations ago. For people who constantly yearn for extra space to multitask while traveling, Lenovo has two add-ons to choose from. The Magic Bay 2nd Display Concept is a small 8-inch screen that attaches magnetically to the ThinkBook 16P. It can be used simply as an external monitor or as an AI dashboard that displays widgets, messaging apps and other tools. On the flipside, the Magic Bay Dual Display Concept adds not one but two additional 13.3-inch panels that flank the notebook's primary screen, giving you a huge amount of real estate for pretty much anything. In addition to using the laptop's mounting system, this prototype also features a built-in kickstand to help keep the whole contraption stable. This is important because while it is rather complicated compared to most accessories, once you get everything set up, it really does a good job of recreating the multi-monitor workstations people have at home or in their office. As for Lenovo's remaining two concepts, they are so new the company wasn't able to show them off during my preview session. The Tiko Pro Concept looks like an even more streamlined take on 2nd Display, as it's a slim panel with an extra-wide aspect ratio that's meant to sit across the top of the laptop's display, sort of like an external notification shade. Meanwhile, the non-pro Tiko Concept is a circular screen that houses an AI companion with its own set of emoji-based faces, gesture-based responses and more. In case that's not enough, Lenovo even teased a cat-themed headband that adds little ears to your robotic friend. At this point, you may be asking how the Tiko is supposed to increase your productivity? And for that, I can only guess that having a friendly face around might boost your mood and thus improve your productivity. Or at the very least, it could be a more charming way of seeing stuff like Slack reactions. Honestly, I have no idea, and I'm not sure Lenovo does either. Now I have to stress again that all of these accessories are concepts, so there's no guarantee that they'll ever officially go on sale. Lenovo says they are merely prototypes meant to help expand and explore how its Magic Bay docking system could be used in the future. But in a time when so many PC makers seem to be having trouble thinking up ways to innovate, it's clear Lenovo isn't being shy about thinking outside the box. Sadly, the ThinkBook 16P Gen 6 is not slated to be available in North America, but for those in Europe and Asia, keep an eye out for it to go on sale sometime this spring or summer.
