I tried Lenovo's foldable OLED laptop at MWC and it's left me with some questions

Lenovo’s on a bit of a tear lately at Mobile World Congress, so long as success is measured by the level of imagination and risk. 

Just a year ago, the company showcased a laptop with a transparent screen. The year before, a rollable laptop that, believe it or not, is finally coming to market this summer. At MWC 2025, the company has several more tricks up its sleeves, including a solar-powered ThinkBook and another with an elongated display that flips open and close. 

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I spent an intimate morning with the latter just weeks before the show, mindful that the mere concept device existed for research and development and less for profits. Here’s how that experience went and why this may be Lenovo’s most confusing invention yet.

Firstly, Lenovo calls the laptop the ThinkBook “Codename Flip” AI PC Concept, which doesn’t really do it justice. I’d be more on board with “Codename Origami” or “Codename Transformer”, as the device can fold its display inward and outward to orient itself in five different modes. 

You can close its Z-shaped figure to initiate tablet mode, lift up and angle the top half of the screen for read mode, collapse the top half with the bottom half, lift up the whole display for the traditional clamshell mode, extend the top half just enough so that the person in front of you can view it in share mode, and keep the full display up for vertical mode. You really have to see the laptop to understand it — and be comfortable bending the thin sheet of glass to make it all work.

I’ve seen similar functionality before in the Huawei Mate XS, which had a super-thin, flexible display that could bend backward. The caveat to such a design is susceptibility to micro-scratches, especially on the portion of the display that isn’t protected when folded back.

But unlike the Huawei phone, the Lenovo is a much larger 13-inch laptop that, when unfolded, transforms into a taller, slightly wobbly, 18.1-inch display. With two full-size windows stacked onto each other, you essentially have a dual-display setup for work and play, only with a noticeable crease in the middle instead of the monitors’ frames.

Also: I tried Lenovo’s ThinkBook with modular displays at MWC – and it worked like magic

That’s a lot more real estate to multitask with spreadsheets, emails, presentations, conferences, and more. You can also fire up TikTok on full screen, and not work.

But I wouldn’t recommend that, not because of the death of productivity but because the thin, flexible OLED display that Lenovo’s using here is very reflective. I’m talking glare and light beams galore, making the laptop almost unusable outdoors.

That’s why I see a future for this kind of device only in the enterprise, where you can leverage the larger-than-average display to visualize information more efficiently and present more easily in meetings. Because of the issue with scratching, this would be the type of laptop you’d use at work and leave at work. It certainly wouldn’t survive in my backpack. 

Also: This Lenovo laptop handled my various workflows with grace – and it’s surprisingly affordable

There’s one other party trick with Codename Flip: the Smart ForcePad, a three-layer illuminated dashboard that adaptively appears on the touchpad. This isn’t a new feature per se, but it does give the MWC concept added functionality by allowing users quick access to media player controls and other toggles.

Lenovo rounds out the ThinkBook concept with flagship specifications, including an Intel Core Ultra 200V or AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series processor and 32GB of LPDDR5x memory powering the system. But none of those features matter now, as the device is still in its development phase. Should Lenovo ever build a market-ready laptop based on Codename Flip, I’d expect it to be a few years later when the current configuration gets replaced by a better, more capable one — and the display is hopefully more sustainable.