Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable

Introduction

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is a laptop that shouldn’t really exist.

That might sound like a strange statement, but it’s arguably true. Lenovo’s strange proof of concept laptops that in the past have included the Auto Twist AI, a laptop whose screen could automatically twist into a tablet mode, and spin to take a 360-degree selfie. These types of devices are designed to show off new technology and what’s possible for manufacturers as they attempt to find the next big thing.

This rollable Lenovo laptop is the first of its kind – a laptop whose screen can extend and contract vertically for those moments when having more screen real estate would be useful, such as for intensive multi-tasking. The brand had shown off a similar device a couple of years ago, and it’s finally come to market in a real surprise move.

Apart from its clever rollable screen, it feels like a run-of-the-mill ultrabook in a similar vein to Lenovo’s other recent releases, with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD inside, plus a compact 14-inch frame and stylish metal chassis.

If you want in on the rollable dream, though, you will have to fork out £3700 / $3200 for the privilege. That kind of money buys you seriously potent gaming laptops, plus creative masters such as the Asus ProArt P16 (4K Lumina Pro OLED), and you’d even have money for the dual-screen Asus Zenbook Duo (2025) with plenty of change left over.

I’ve been putting the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable through its paces for the last couple of weeks to see if it’s one of the best laptops we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Premium feel
• Meagre port selection
• Comfortable keyboard and trackpad

As much as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable has a clever OLED screen, you wouldn’t necessarily know by looking at it. In fact, it looks and feels very much like Lenovo’s other recent premium ultrabooks with a slick silver chassis and a smooth metal finish. The lid has a shiny Lenovo logo and a pleasant two-tone grey finish.

A weight of 1.69kg is heavy for a 14-inch laptop that’s 20mm or thin, although, as the screen can extend all the way to nearly 17 inches, I can provide some dispensation. It is still compact enough to be slung into a bag and taken on your travels, although extending the screen out while you’re on the train may get you a few funny looks – it takes a few seconds, and comes with a quiet mechanical whirring as it goes up or down.

The port selection on this laptop is very meagre, with just two USB-C ports on the left side, one of which is used for charging. As Lenovo has usually been very good at kitting out its laptops with a far-reaching selection, this is a disappointment. The right side is home solely to a power button.

Lifting the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable’s lid reveals a comfortable keyboard in classic Lenovo fashion. It’s a more compact layout, owing to this laptop’s 14-inch shell, but features a responsive and tactile keypress that felt great to use for typing up work over the course of a week.

The trackpad here is a little small against other recent laptops I’ve tested, but with a metal surface feels slick and smooth to the touch.

Display and Sound

• Clever extending OLED screen
• Perfect colours, plus deep blacks and lovely contrast
• Decent speakers

The standout feature of the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is its class-leading OLED screen, which can be extended from a standard 14-inch form factor to a taller and larger 16.7-inch panel with the touch of a button on the keyboard’s taskbar.

We’ve seen laptops transition to a slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio in recent times to provide more vertical real estate for modern workloads. However, this Lenovo screen goes even further, offering an 8:9 aspect ratio when the panel is fully extended, with a 2000×2350 resolution.

This might sound a bit funny, but against normal laptop displays, it seems to preserve the width of a tab while providing enough height to have two tabs vertically stacked, as opposed to side-by-side. In my experience, I found it to make multi-tasking a lot easier than with a more traditional aspect ratio, given I could keep one tab open for writing in a document, and the other below for flicking back to when checking up product details or testing notes. It felt natural to use.

The OLED screen in a general sense on the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is an excellent one, too. It’s got the typical deep, inky blacks and lovely contrast ratio I’ve come to expect, with a measured black level of 0.01 and a contrast ratio of 27910:1. Moreover, its 6400K colour temperature is virtually ideal, too.

Its colour accuracy is perfect across the board with 100% sRGB, DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB coverage. This enhances the panel’s ability in both productivity and more intense, colour-sensitive tasks, and makes it one of the most accurate panels you’ll find on any laptop.

Its 382.3 nits of peak brightness is reasonable, although not as bright as other laptop panels I’ve tested. This screen also provides decent detail with its 2000×2350 resolution, plus its 120Hz refresh rate when the screen is fully extended provides a responsive feel.

As for the speakers, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable’s drivers are decent. There’s good depth to their sound, plus reasonable bass, and the Harmon Kardon name at least provides some respect to the unit.

Performance

• Potent performance from Core Ultra 258V chip
• Beefy integrated graphics
• Solid RAM and SSD combo

The Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable features similar internal guts to what I’ve seen on a lot of ultrabooks this year, opting for an Intel Lunar Lake processor – specifically, the Core Ultra 7 258V with its eight cores and eight threads. It’s a chip that provides solid performance for both basic productivity tasks and more intensive loads, while being decently efficient.

The scores it achieved in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests are in the ballpark for what I’d expect for this chip, and similar to other Lenovo laptops, including the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition, which both have the same processor. It means we’re getting good single-core scores and decent multi-threaded performance, even if Intel has ditched hyperthreading with this chip.

The high PCMark10 score proves this laptop is well-suited to productivity and business-style tasks, although 3DMark Time Spy wouldn’t run at all on this machine, perhaps owing to the odd screen resolution.

If it’s any consolation, my testing of this processor in other laptops proves its Arc 140V integrated graphics are rather capable, providing a good amount of oomph for more intensive creative loads, such as photo and video editing, and even a spot of gaming.

32GB of fast DDR5 RAM provides enough headroom for those creative loads and heavier multi-tasking work, while a capacious 1TB SSD provides ample space for a solid amount of apps and locally stored files. Its speeds of 6180.47 MB/s reads and 4806.16 MB/s writes are pretty good, even if they’re overshadowed by PCIe Gen 5 SSDs that are becoming increasingly common in some of this laptop’s rivals.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install 
• Minimal Lenovo-specific software
• Copilot+ PC smarts are here if you want them

As much as the Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is a different proposition in terms of its hardware, its software situation is remarkably similar to other Lenovo laptops. We’ve got a reasonably clean Windows 11 install with minimal pre-installed apps, including McAfee antivirus.

There are some Lenovo-specific system apps here, including the catch-all system app Lenovo Vantage in the taskbar, plus the ThinkBook Workspace app that’s a boon for splitting the screen down in its full format to make multi-tasking a breeze.

The Thinkbook Plus Gen 6 Rollable also has enough power with its Core Ultra 7 258V processor to meet Microsoft’s minimum requirements for this laptop to be classified as a Copilot+ PC. This means you can access some of Microsoft’s special AI features that have been featured on most of the other recent ultrabook releases, such as the option for AI filters and generative image work in Paint and Photos, and the nifty Windows Studio webcam effects for auto-framing and maintaining eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 8 hours 19 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

Lenovo has been quite modest with the battery capacity of the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, with it only sporting a 66Whr cell. They quote up to 15 hours of video playback on a single charge, which would put this laptop as one of the top performers in its size class.

In running the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery benchmark at the requisite 150 nits of brightness, this Lenovo laptop lasted for eight hours and 19 minutes. That’s quite disappointing, considering it’s only just over half of Lenovo’s quoted time, and it doesn’t meet our general 10-hour target. A silver lining is that using this laptop all day with the screen extended only saps around 15 minutes from its runtime.

It comes with a compact 65W GaN charger, which puts charge back into it at a decent rate. Getting it back to 50 percent took 37 minutes, while a full charge was around an hour and a half.

Should you buy it?

FAQs