Tools of the trade: this rollable OLED screen Lenovo laptop is making Black Friday deals a breeze

Every so often, it seems fun and interesting to give you a peek behind the curtain so you can see how we do our jobs and the tools we use that can make life easier. Will has spoken in the past about how useful a ‘triple-screen laptop’ has been to help him cover Prime Day sales, which became a boon for having multiple screens in a decently portable form factor.

It just so happens that I think I can go one better, with Lenovo’s new Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable. Lenovo usually releases funny proof of concept devices at trade shows that never necessarily make it to market – there have been options with screens on spinning hinges or a laptop that’s entirely solar powered in the past – fun devices that prove what could be possible in the future. I think this new Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is one of the first proper options that you can actually buy.

As the name suggests, this Lenovo laptop’s screen is rollable – that is, press a button, and it can extend the screen vertically to give you more space. It goes from a more compact 14-inch option all the way up to a 17-inch one with the tap of one button on the taskbar. Granted, its motorised mechanism is a little loud, and there is a bit of a wait for the screen to extend, but it’s mighty clever.

I just so happened to be one of the first folks in the country to get my hands on one of these, and have put it through some strenuous benchmark testing for a review elsewhere. Nonetheless, I’ve also been using it for day-to-day stuff, which has encompassed a lot of early Black Friday deals work here and for a national newspaper. And having an extendable screen is more helpful than you might think for multitasking. A lot of modern laptops have come with slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratios to provide more vertical space, but this laptop’s extendable screen works out to 8:9.

It essentially means I can have one tab open with a document open for writing copy, and another below for referring back to product details and switch between them interchangeably. Of course, snapping tabs to do this side by side in Windows has been a feature for years, but you sacrifice on the width of the page – and trying to snap Chrome tabs in macOS requires manual labour. You could, of course, use an ultrawide monitor for this purpose, but then you’re still actually having to look around for the information you need, rather than simply flicking your eyes up or down.

With Lenovo’s rollable laptop, it preserves the width of the page rather than the height, arguably making multitasking easier, or at least in my time with this laptop, it has. This proves especially handy when traipsing through huge spreadsheets of deals with hundreds of lines in them and I want to retain the at-a-glance information about a product, its price, and how that compares historically. On other laptops, I’d have to click into one tab and side–scroll to find the information and then go back to where I was writing. Windows also isn’t funny about stacking two tabs atop one another, making it feel like a natural experience.

The screen itself is a decent one, as a modern OLED laptop display should be. It’s got excellent depth and contrast, is perfectly colour accurate in my testing, and feels responsive with a 120Hz refresh rate in its extended mode (weirdly, it’s only 60Hz when it’s in its smaller size). Using this laptop with the screen fully extended all day also doesn’t affect general battery life, either – it only saps another 15-20 minutes over the course of a day when set to around 150 nits.

Apart from the screen, this is a regular, run-of-the-mill 2025 ultrabook, with a comfortable keyboard that’s classically Lenovo, plus a nicely dampened trackpad. Inside is an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Lunar Lake chip that powers a lot of this laptop’s contemporaries, providing eight cores and eight threads for solid performance, plus beefy integrated graphics. This model also comes with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for storin’ stuff and giving headroom for multitasking.

Of course, as the first laptop of its kind, this rollable OLED screen doesn’t come cheap. It’s well in excess of £3000/$3000for a laptop whose spec sheet would otherwise cost anything from a third to a half of that. And it only comes with two USB-C ports on one side, one of which is used for charging, meaning most of my time has been spent using a USB-C adapter in the same way I used to with an old MacBook if I want to expand any further when this laptop is connected to power.

It’s sometimes quite rare that I find a product that can help my workflow so much. I felt the same way when moving to a mechanical keyboard for the first time, or finding out about the ‘New Folder With Selection’ command in macOS that is such a huge timesaver (someone please implement this into Windows), and this Lenovo rollable laptop is genuinely a revelation. It’s not perfect by any means, with its port selection and sub 10-hour battery life in any configuration, but I’m genuinely excited to see if this tech can become more ubiquitous. For folks like me at a time like this, it’s a lifesaver.