Quick Summary
Compal Electronics has unveiled the Infinite Laptop – a notebook concept with a rollable panel.
Unlike other designs though, the display here doesn't extend vertically. It adds four horizontal inches when you expand it, to widen your display.
Compal's Infinite Laptop is the latest rollable laptop design to break cover – and this one takes a very different direction from others we've seen. Quite literally.
Where most rollable laptop innovations extend upwards, the Infinite Laptop extends horizontally – widening the display.
We've seen several rollable laptops in recent months, such as the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6. Compal's take on the rollable laptop doesn't extend quite so dramatically – the display of the Lenovo doubles in size when you stretch it vertically – but it may be more useful.
Why Compal's rollable laptop could be the more practical option
The Infinite Laptop extends from 14- to 18-inches horizontally. Four inches isn't a lot of expansion, but the fact that it's sideways rather than up means it's useful space.
We're used to working in landscape in laptops, and so are our apps on the best Windows laptops – so extra horizontal space means extra screen real estate for palettes, sidebars and other tools, so the main editing area doesn't get cluttered.
A horizontally-expanding display is also much more useful for entertainment, whether that's watching movies or playing games. Doubling the vertical area isn't much use for playing GTA or streaming The Substance, but extending horizontally gives you a better aspect ratio for widescreen entertainment.
As Digital Trends reports, while the device has won an IF Design Award there aren't any technical details available – so we don't know what's inside, let alone what it's likely to cost.
The panel is clearly a rollable OLED, but beyond that the Infinite Laptop is infinitely mysterious.
Compal may not even put this laptop into production, but it could appear under another name. That's because the company is what's known as an ODM – original device manufacturer – and it makes white-label designs for brands to adapt.
So while you might not see a Compal Infinite Laptop anytime soon, you may see something very similar from a better-known laptop brand.
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