It was only a matter of time before we saw a foldable display on a laptop and it’s no surprise to see Lenovo do it first.
At MWC 2025, the laptop giant and Motorola owner has shown off another in a long line of interesting concept devices. Last year we saw a transparent screen on a laptop and now it’s folding – and this makes way more practical sense.
The ThinkBook Flip AI PC Concept essentially takes the kind of screen we’re used to seeing on some outward foldable phones, like the Huawei Mate Xs and Honor V Purse, makes it a lot bigger and attaches it to a laptop chassis.
Lenovo calls it the “industry’s first outward-folding notebook” and the fairly simple idea is that there are a lot of different ways you can use the screen. It’s potentially a new form of the convertible 2-in-1 laptop.
Chris Martin / Foundry
You can use the ThinkBook Flip in Tablet, Read, Clamshell, Share and Vertical modes, with all the different positions you can place the screen. In traditional laptop mode, it’s a 13-inch display that can be unfolded to a full 18.1-inch.
I like the idea of the tablet mode to watch content in cramped situations like on a train table, and the curve of the display when it’s folded over can be used as its own strip – a bit like the Touch Bar on old MacBooks or the edge of the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge.
The flexible OLED display looks pretty good with specs such as a 120Hz refresh rate and 400 nit brightness. It’s touch-sensitive, too.
Overall, I quite like the idea but there’s clearly work to do still before this laptop is ready to ship to willing buyers.
The software is janky and encountered numerous errors and glitches while I was at the Lenovo booth taking a look.
I also worry a lot about the device’s durability in its current form. The outer display is exposed when you ‘shut’ the laptop as you would a normal model, there’s a huge bulge along the crease when the screen is in Vertical mode, and it topples over all too easily.
Still, that’s why devices like this are proof of concepts and I applaud Lenovo again for trying things out.
Whether the ThinkBook Flip comes to market or not, and how much it will fetch, remains to be seen but it’s certainly one of the most memorable devices I’ve seen at MWC 2025.
