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

Every now and then it seems fun and interesting to take a look behind the scenes so you can see how we do our jobs and what tools we use that can make life easier. Will has spoken in the past about how helpful “laptop with three screens” the goal was to help it cover Prime Day sales, which was a boon for having multiple screens in a decently portable form factor.

As it happens, I think I can go even better with Lenovo's new Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable. Lenovo usually releases fun proof-of-concept devices at shows that never necessarily make it to market – in the past there have been options with screens on rotating hinges or a laptop powered entirely by solar power – fun devices that prove that could be possible in the future. I think the new Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is one of the first viable options you can actually buy.

As the name suggests, the screen of this Lenovo laptop can be folded, meaning you press a button and the screen can be extended vertically to free up more space. It ranges from a more compact 14-inch option all the way up to a 17-inch one at the touch of a button on the taskbar. Sure, its motorized mechanism is a little loud and there's a bit of a wait for the screen to pop out, but it's very smart.

I happened to be one of the first people in the country to get my hands on one and put it through rigorous performance testing for review elsewhere. However, I also use it for everyday tasks which include many early Black Friday deals are working here and for the national newspaper. And having a retractable screen is more useful for multitasking than you might think. Many modern laptops have a slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio to provide more vertical space, but this laptop's retractable screen goes up to 8:9.

Essentially, this means I can have one tab with the document open to write copy, and another one below to go back to the product details and switch between the two interchangeably. Sure, snapping tabs to do this on Windows has been a feature for years, but you sacrifice page width, and trying to snap Chrome tabs on macOS requires manual labor. You can, of course, use an ultra-wide monitor for this purpose, but then you still have to look for the information you need, and not just move your eyes up or down.

Lenovo's foldable laptop maintains page width rather than height, which arguably makes multitasking easier, or at least it was during my time with this laptop. This is especially useful when viewing huge deal tables with hundreds of rows and I want to keep a summary of the product, its price and its historical comparison. On other laptops, I had to click one tab and use side scrolling to find information, then return to where I was writing. It's also not funny for Windows to have two tabs stacked on top of each other, making it seem natural.

The screen itself is decent, as a modern OLED laptop display should be. It has excellent depth and contrast, delivered perfect color reproduction in my testing, and is responsive thanks to its 120Hz refresh rate in Extended mode (oddly enough, it's only 60Hz in the smaller size). Using this laptop with the screen fully extended all day doesn't impact overall battery life either – at around 150 nits of brightness, it lasts another 15-20 minutes throughout the day.

Aside from the screen, this is your average, run-of-the-mill 2025 Ultrabook, with a comfortable keyboard in classic Lenovo style and a well-cushioned trackpad. Inside is the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Lunar Lake chip found in many modern laptops, delivering eight cores and eight threads for smooth performance, as well as powerful integrated graphics. This model also comes with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for storage and multitasking.

Of course, this rollable OLED screen, a first of its kind on a laptop, doesn't come cheap. This significantly exceeds £3000/3000 US dollarsfor a laptop whose specs would otherwise cost between a third and half that amount. And it only features two USB-C ports on one side, one of which is used for charging, meaning that most of my time was spent using a USB-C adapter in the same way I did with the old MacBook if I want to expand the capabilities even further when this laptop is plugged in to power.

Sometimes it's quite rare that I find a product that can help my workflow so much. I felt the same way when I first switched to a mechanical keyboard or learned about the New Folder with Selection command in macOS, which is a huge time saver (someone please implement this in Windows), and this Lenovo foldable laptop is a revelation. It's by no means perfect, with its choice of ports and battery life of less than 10 hours in any configuration, but I'm genuinely excited to see if this technology can become more ubiquitous. For people like me, this is a savior at a time like this.