Foldable Laptops

Suppose you got placed after 4 hectic years of your B.Tech (Stop imagining about it, come back to the blog ). One day you get back to your room after an early leave. You are exhausted and decide to binge watch a web series. You start watching Sacred Games season 2 and soon, you get bored by listening to the spiritual talks by Guru Ji. You slept and woke up super late. You take an auto after doing your daily chores. While sitting in the auto, you remembered that you had to send an email to an important client and, you left your phone in the room. Since there are other people also in the auto, there is no room to take out your laptop and work. At this time, you wish that if your laptop had the size of a tablet, you could have done your work easily.

At CES 2020 (Consumer Electronic Show), Lenovo unveiled the World's First Foldable laptop Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold, which is ready to revolutionize the world of laptops. In this blog, we will talk about the different challenges Lenovo faced while developing it and how did they overcome those challenges.

The first challenge was, of course, building a Foldable screen. Most of the screens that we see in our lives are LCD screens. They're liquid crystal displays and are typically built around a glass space. You have a glass screen or a glass backing for the LCD.

Foldable screens are made from OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diodes). One of the things that happen with an OLED screen is that the pixels, the light portion of the screen that emits light or that displays an image, is built into the screen itself. So the LEDs are on the actual screen technology instead of being behind it projecting through a glass pane. What happens with flexible displays is that they have this OLED screen technology that's being printed on a thin layer of plastic and, when you've got that thin layer of plastic you can do all kinds of things with it, you can bend it or shape it in different ways.

Within the screen itself, there are four to five layers that bend. There's the layer of the screen itself, the supporting metal layer under each side, and a second layer that goes all the way across with a special laser-cut folding area in the middle. The entire screen had to be supported by two precision-machined carbon fiber plates.

There's also a four-part hinge that has interlocking arms and will make sure that the pieces fit well together when you have it open or bent.

Lenovo had to completely design a new type of cooling system from the ground up. So there is a fan and a heat sink as well as a heat spreader that sandwich the entire motherboard to keep it cool, reliable, and have a good user experience.

Now the X1 Fold runs on regular Windows 10, which isn't designed for these kinds of foldable screens. So Lenovo had to give you the ability to, for example, pin certain apps on different sides of the screen, and there's a little icon in the taskbar that you can click to do this. If you use the device in portrait mode when it's unfolded you can click the same icon and that gives you the option to bring up an on-screen keyboard, and then if you fold the laptop on top of each other it's like you have a mini laptop with a touchscreen keyboard. 

Or you can use the wireless-Bluetooth keyboard, put it on top of the onscreen keyboard, and then you have a miniature laptop with little keys. Alternatively, you can unfold the laptop to its full screen, and use the kickstand on the back, and use the keyboard wirelessly.

There have been some pretty high profile failures in this product category already (a recent one was Samsung Galaxy Fold), so there's a reason to be skeptical, but the company is confident in its design. There are some neat touches too like there's a slight crease in the display when you fold it open, but it's not super visible, and although there's a gap when you fold it together, between the two sections of the screen that gets filled up by the keyboard which is a nice touch.

 

The problem with experimental tech products is that companies charge money for them, and this one is gonna cost quite a lot (around 1,78,217 Indian rupees). But as the competition increases, the product will become affordable and will change the world of laptops.