When you buy a laptop, you typically do so knowing that its screen will stay the same size throughout its lifetime. If you get a 14-inch machine, that’s the screen you get. Want anything bigger? You’ll need to get a separate display. But that’s not the case with the Lenovo Legion Pro Rollable Concept, a gaming laptop with an expandable screen. I saw it in person recently: it’s a wild idea with some interesting use cases.
As the helpfully descriptive name suggests, the Legion Pro Rollable is a concept device with no guaranteed launch date. Regardless, various tech companies have been developing rollable display technology in recent years, including Motorola and Lenovo at Mobile World Congress in 2024.
This particular concept from Lenovo was first shown to the public at CES earlier this year. At first glance, it’s a relatively unassuming laptop with a 16-inch OLED screen. It’s based on the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, replete with an Intel Core Ultra chipset and an Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU.
If no one told you otherwise, you’d think it was just another gaming PC. But then comes the magic trick.
By pressing a shortcut, the Legion Pro Rollable’s screen slowly unfurls outwards, giving you 21.5 inches of screen real estate. Hit the shortcut again, and the display grows even further to a sizable 24 inches.
How did the Legion Pro Rollable Concept look in person?
That’s a neat party trick, but what’s the point of it? When Lenovo first showed its rollable gaming concept device, esports was top of mind. Top-level players travelling on the professional circuit who don’t want to lug around an external monitor: that’s who Lenovo thought of.
At a recent Lenovo event in Sydney, however, the case was also made for gamers who want an ultrawide display while away from the home office. That doesn’t necessarily mean gaming (but it often does); multitasking during work hours is a realistic proposition, with a big enough screen to have multiple windows and apps open simultaneously.
In the short demonstration I saw, the Legion Pro Rollable had one of the world’s most popular competitive games running: League of Legends. It looked sharp and colourful on the OLED screen, with little obvious difference in quality between the standard 16-inch mode and the extended 24-inch view.
During the demo, the full user interface wasn’t visible unless the laptop was set to its full 24-inch configuration. Contracting the screen back down cut off some visual elements, like the mini-map.
I asked the Lenovo representative on hand whether it was a result of needing game-by-game optimisation, or whether the hardware didn’t support automatically adjusting software to different aspect ratios. They alluded to the Legion Pro Rollable’s concept status and assured me that should such a device reach the market, games would be able to detect the screen size and ratio, and adapt accordingly.
Side-on, creases visibly showed up at the points where the screen extended outwards. It was far less noticeable when viewed front-on, but it was clear that Lenovo still had some kinks to iron out. That was acknowledged, too, with the company rep saying the creases are one of the next challenges to address.
A concept the Legion Pro Rollable may be, yet it was still an interesting prototype to see up close. There are some clear, albeit niche, use cases for such a device, too. I shuddered to think of how many thousands of dollars such a device would cost if it ever became a commercially sold product.
A more calming thought was that all good technology has to start somewhere. That Lenovo wants to show its experimental tech publicly, instead of behind closed doors, indicates that it’s genuinely interested to know what people think.
Chris Button attended the Home of Legion event in Sydney as a guest of Lenovo.
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