Every year CES – the world’s largest consumer electronics show – showcases the latest and greatest tech at its Las Vegas home base. For 2020, while there has been the theme of 8K TVs, there’s also been a thread of folding devices turning up too.
Here we highlight the best of the bunch that have appeared on the show floor and behind closed doors, from folding phones, to folding PC-tablets. Is this a nod to the foldable future?
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold
We’ll start with the one that’s arguably the most impressive – because it’ll be going on sale in mid 2020. The ThinkPad X1 Fold is like a 13.3-inch tablet, but it can be folded into a laptop position with its magnetically attaching keyboard (see lead image), or folded totally in half to make for an easy-to-carry leather-clad folio-like portable. It will cost from $2,499, though, so it sure isn’t cheap.
Dell Ori concept
Despite being a concept, the Dell Ori is built in a similar vein to the Lenovo. The name is short for ‘origami’, not that you can fold this device into complex shapes. The 13.4-inch screen folds in half, comes with a stylus for scrawling on that flexible screen, but doesn’t feature a keyboard – making it a slightly different prospect to the Lenovo.
Intel Horseshoe Bend concept
This one was a bit of a surprise, when Intel pulled out a larger-scale foldable on stage at its CES press conference. At 17-inches, the Horseshoe Bend concept is far larger than the others on this page, but as it folds in half that size is considerably cut down for portability purposes – to the scale of a 13-inch laptop. Like the Dell concept, a keyboard is absent, which is a little perplexing here given the scale (and we know how hard typing on virtual keyboard is, as the Lenovo Yoga Book showed us).
TCL folding phone
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen TCL’s folding phone, as the company showed off a not-operational sample at Mobile World Congress 11 months previous. Unlike the Samsung Galaxy Fold equivalent, which costs a small fortune, TCL’s goal is to provide a more affordable device. The bezel within the 7.2-inch device is therefore rather large, but
