Lenovo's Legion Go Fold gaming portable depicts a new foldable future

Foldables have come a long way in the past few years, but outside of reinventing the flip phone and hiding a tablet within a smartphone, the concepts haven’t changed all that much. Lenovo, though, has a really clever idea in its new Legion Go Fold concept, which I really hope makes it to reality someday.

The Lenovo Legion Go Fold is a gaming handheld that, as the name implies, has a folding display. When folded, a 7.7-inch screen sits in between two halves of a controller, but that screen can then unfold into an 11.6-inch display which you can use both vertically and horizontally, for a tall or a wide gaming setup.

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The controllers are similar to what you get on Nintendo Switch 2, with the ability to detach the controllers fairly easily, or attach them to a separate piece which turns the pair into a wireless gamepad. The display, meanwhile, can also be attached to a magnetic keyboard/trackpad/kickstand setup that effectively acts like a tabletop laptop setup. There’s even a little screen in the controller to show your CPU temps and other data.

Put simply, it’s brilliant.

While this early proof-of-concept is a little rough – the controllers feel like they’re barely attached, and the overall design feels unfinished – the idea is really solid. Gaming handhelds have a lot of power, and being able to both ditch the controllers and double the size makes for a really good way to give the device a second purpose. Beyond that, the ability to switch between a relatively compact display and a huge tablet-sized canvas makes for a really great solution to the current choice you have to make between the two options.

I’m also a little concerned about the outward-folding nature of this display. If there’s one thing we quickly learned about foldables, it’s that having that display exposed is a bad idea. So, as Lenovo refines this concept, I hope we get a version that is more protective of that display. Perhaps a device that has a book-style form factor with an external display, like a Galaxy Z Fold 7 (or I guess, more accurately, the Motorola Razr Fold given this is Lenovo we’re talking about).

All the ways you can use the Legion Go Fold

I think this shows a new future of what we’ll start seeing from foldables.

This technology has a lot of promise outside of smartphones, and it feels like we’re just scratching the surface. This concept in particular has a ton of potential, though, because it fills so many uses in one device. I’ve been wanting a foldable tablet for a while, and Legion Go Fold just takes that idea up a notch.

That said, it’s tough to know if this will see the light of day anytime soon. While Lenovo has a track record of bringing concepts to reality over time, the “when” is never something we know this early on.