Lenovo is among the companies developing early rollable mobile displays. At Lenovo Tech World 22, a virtual event hosted by the Hong Kong-based company, a rollable-screen laptop was showcased along some rollable smartphones, a format that is generating a great deal of interest. Lenovo Intelligent Devices Group president Luca Rossi previewed a concept ThinkPad laptop with a vertically extending screen, calling the potential of such a device “compelling,” taking “multitasking, browsing, and mobility applications to another level.”

“Form factor innovation is a very dynamic space,” Rossi said during the presentation. Without disclosing a model name or specs, much less a release date, Rossi gave a brief working demo where viewers “see the screen of what appears to be an old-school notebook slowly begin to rise from the keyboard deck, unfurling into a display that is monstrously, disconcertingly tall,” writes The Verge, estimating the screen height grew about 50 percent, “from 9-ish to 13.5-ish inches tall.”

That doesn’t clarify whether the screen can be stopped at various increments or must fully extend. Worrying about the added weight, The Verge nonetheless exclaims “look how cool this is!”

Tom’s Hardware thinks the concept design looks “uncannily” like the ThinkPad X1 Fold 2022, which has a 16.3-inch diagonal vertical display from a 12-inch footprint.

Engadget notes the Lenovo rollable “starts with a typical landscape display and then rolls up to a square shape, making it better for documents or vertical TikTok style videos.”

Lenovo also showed-off a rollable concept smartphone from its Motorola subsidiary. “The phone starts out at a very pocketable 4 inches high, but with the click of a button, the OLED panel extends to a normal-sized 6.5 inches,” Engadget reports.

“Another click retracts the phone back to its original form” with usability at either size, as screen content automatically adapts. Samsung has also displayed rollable phone prototypes, as did LG (before announcing in April 2021 it was exiting the smartphone business), and Huawei.

Tom’s also reports glimpsing images of “another interesting Lenovo product,” the Lenovo Yoga Paper, displayed on the Weibo social page of a company marketing exec. “The images show a working device with e-Ink display and graspable edge with stylus garage. It is another device where we don’t have (m)any specs to ponder over, for now,” Tom’s writes.

No tech event would be complete without mention of the metaverse, and Lenovo World had that, too, as its CTO Dr. Yong Rui, shared feature points for the electrical engineering that will lay the foundation necessary for moving in virtual worlds (which Rui referred to as “meta-space”).

The entire Lenovo Tech World 2022 is available for replay.