The Lenovo X1 Prototype: A Small, Rollable, Second Monitor for Tablets and Other Smartphones (It is Not a Smartphone)
The device has some less obvious elements. Because the rollable screen is rolling around the bottom of the phone rather than disappearing inside its chassis, you’re left with a small secondary display on its back when it’s rolled up. When you’re taking selfies with your phone, you can use it as a viewfinder. Lenovo has even included a feature where the rear display plays cute eye-catching animations to get a child to look at the phone when you want to take a photo of them. It’s not easy to find useful things on tiny screens like this, even if the cover display on foldable flip phones from the likes of the likes of Oppo are anything to go by.
The company points out that the laptop with an 8:9 aspect ratio is like having two larger displays on top of one another. It is not the same as the dual-screen Yoga Book 9i. we tried out at CES and which is due to release in June. It is a useful form-factor and may be useful to anyone that wants to use an external display as a portable second monitor, since they are able to work on a single small laptop display.
The device looks good in our demo but it is not ready to be considered a consumer ready device. I asked about the ability to hold up over long periods of time and was told that it would be between 20,000 to 30,000 rolls. The company did not tell how many rolls the prototype can survive.
This simple-seeming design has a lot of mileage for the company. There are obvious use cases, like being able to watch a video with no black bars and having a larger screen when you want to write an email. In the future, users will be able to personalize the screen size of the phone for each use case, and it is hoped that the final version will adjust the screen to suit different apps.
In terms of resolution the display is 2024 x 1604 when it’s in small mode, and 2024 x 2368 when fully extended. It’s pretty usable without the need to fully extend the display. The company that supplies the screen is Sharp. The X1 foldable laptops were worked on by the company. Although it has said it is working on a rollable laptop display with Intel, the prototype it has was not attached to a keyboard.
It’s been thought that a tall display like this one could help office workers and creative professionals by giving them the ability to write on the bottom half in a spreadsheet while retaining their notes and sources in the top. Plenty of people like to use vertical monitors with their desktop PCs, and Windows has no problem stacking windows above and below one another.
I also had questions about weight and battery life. I was not allowed to pick up the laptop myself, and I wasn’t told how much it weighs. Ideally you’d want this thing to be both lighter than carrying around a laptop plus a portable monitor, as well as being more compact, but we’ll have to wait and see on the former point. The unrolling mechanism doesn’t sound ideal at a time when many laptops’ batteries can still struggle to make it through a day’s use.
When all neatly rolled up, Lenovo’s Motorola rollable offers a 5-inch display with a 15:9 aspect ratio. You can use a small tap of a side button to open the screen which has a 22:9 aspect ratio.
Another cool touch is that the display can hide the selfie camera and earpiece, and rolls down to reveal them when you make a phone call or go to take a selfie.