Smartphone form factors have converged on the flat glass slab over the years, but a new trend is emerging. Flexible OLED technology has reached the point that companies like Samsung, Xiaomi, and Motorola have started selling phones that can fold in half. We’ve also seen a few concept rollable phones, and now Motorola has one of those, too. It just showed off the unnamed rollable concept at Lenovo Tech World, and it looks more refined than many of the proofs-of-concept we’ve seen in the past.
The rollable has a flexible OLED panel that wraps around the bottom of the phone. When fully retracted, the device has 5 inches of screen real estate on the front. When expanded, the full panel slides around to the front, giving you a 6.5-inch screen. President of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group, Luca Rossi, shows how the device utilizes an internal motor to slide the display, adjusting automatically to video content. It’s a cool demo, but the slider looks a little slow to deal with on a daily basis.
Motorola, which is a Lenovo subsidiary these days, doesn’t say anything about the internals of this device, merely calling it a “premium smartphone.” But in its 5-inch format, Rossi says the device is more compact than any other similarly equipped device. It would also be a lot easier to carry around in your pocket than a 6.5-inch smartphone that doesn’t magically shrink.
It’s unclear from the short video where the screen goes when it rolls. TCL demoed a (non-functional) rollable prototype a few years back that spooled up the OLED inside the body, but the Moto device appears to fold around the back. If the screen is exposed on the rear, that could be a durability concern, but it would also offer some interesting user interface options. For example, you could use the display on the back as a camera viewfinder to take selfies with the high-quality rear cameras. In fact, the concept phone does not appear to have any visible front-facing cameras, so perhaps that’s the intention.
Lenovo also showed a similar expandable screen in a laptop form factor, which expanded from a standard laptop ratio to become taller than it was wide. However, it’s unclear if this was simply a render — we only saw a few seconds of footage. Both devices come from Motorola’s 312 Labs, an internal group that aims to develop new technologies around foldables, 5G, and more.
There’s no guarantee either of these rollable concepts will ever become a product you can buy. Motorola is currently struggling just to make its foldables desirable. It launched two Razr-branded flip-style foldables in quick succession several years ago, and it finally unveiled the third one this year. However, it was only released in China. Meanwhile, Samsung has overtaken Motorola, with four generations of foldable phones that it has sold worldwide.
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