This Is World's First Foldable-Display Laptop, And We Wonder Why It's Even A Thing

We recently saw the first few flexible devices to actually hit the market. The Samsung Galaxy Fold was the first to make it to production, but has unfortunately been delayed thanks to serious build issues. Hopefully, the world's first foldable PC does a little better.

Yup, there's now a foldable PC on the market. I know I know, some of you are going to be smart-asses and say a foldable PC is just a laptop, but it's not the same thing okay?

Images courtesy: Lenovo

At its Accelerate conference yesterday, PC maker Lenovo unveiled their design for an upcoming foldable display laptop. It still remains unnamed, and probably requires more tweaking and testing before it launches, but odds are we'll see this in the market real soon.

The new device will supposedly join Lenovo's Thinkpad X1 line, and will be marketed as a standalone replacement for a standard laptop, not a novelty device.

The PC has a 13.3-inch single OLED 2K, with a 4 by 3 aspect ratio. Normally, to have a display that size, you'd need it housed in a chassis of the same width. But because this display gets folded in half, the body is much smaller. When folded in half, it's instead a 9.6-inch display. The device uses an OLED display with a polymer screen, just like the Galaxy Fold, however this one is made by LG.

The thing is, it might actually be easier to build a workable foldable smartphone than a laptop. This is mainly because users expecting to use this as a full laptop and not a tablet will want a good keyboard. In the case of this one, you can keep it situated like a traditional clamshell laptop and use a on-screen touch keyboard, as well as unfolding it to use as a full touchscreen or with a Bluetooth keyboard. Touchscreen keyboards are notoriously finicky however, so we'll have to wait and see just how well Lenovo manages to execute this.

Lenovo also had to think about its battery placement. In the Galaxy Fold, the battery is split into two parts, on for each panel. Doing that here would make the "top" of the PC too heavy when using in laptop mode, meaning it would fall over. Instead, the prototype has just one battery in one panel, to give the device a definitive top and bottom.

The device will; run Windows, powered by an Intel processor, though there's no news on which one that will be. Unfortunately, that's all we know about it at the moment. There's no pricing or ship date yet, but Lenovo says it's looking at an early 2020 launch, probably CES 2020.

That gives them plenty of time to work out the kinks before rushing a foldable device like Samsung did.