Carry small, use big: the continuing history of foldable technology (and why it's actually useful)

It recently occurred to me that Lenovo is a company that loves to fold devices!

We have a history of breaking new ground by doing the seemingly impossible. The most-recent device is of course the new ThinkPad X1 Fold.

Before that was the ThinkPad X41t tablet and the first IdeaPad Yoga 13.

And over 25 years ago, in fact before Lenovo bought the PC business from IBM, there was the TrackWrite 'butterfly keyboard' for the ThinkPad 701. You can even argue that the original ThinkPad 700C in 1992 folded. It was a ground-breaking development back then.

The ThinkPad 701C and ThinkPad X41t both defined new (folding) device categories in their day.

If you love technology as much as I do, all these devices are of course very cool, but our continued development of this type of technology is built on something much more valuable to our customers. Part of that is how each innovation addresses user needs and business requirements in clever ways. Each represents a moment in history, and the way we attacked user needs, and fixed user problems, at those moments.

The real question we've spent the last 28 years answering in one way or another is this: How do you carry small and use big? Because users want the convenience of a device in a small form factor with the advantages of a full-size keyboard, full-size screen, and no compromise on functionality.

That's always been the reason for foldable devices, why they were designed and built, and why to this day the various engineering challenges around carrying small and using big continue to be worth chasing down.

And let me tell you, there are engineering challenges in getting this right!

Back in history, the challenge around the TrackWrite 'butterfly keyboard' was to provide literally a full-size mechanical keyboard in a reduced-size laptop format. The design literally started with an engineer, the late John Karidis, breaking a keyboard in half.

Back then, we had the advantage that laptops were still deep enough to accommodate a folding mechanism, albeit a highly complex one, and the idea and advantages of a folding keyboard really only disappeared as new keyboard and key switch technology became available and screen size sweet spots increased beyond 10 inches.

In recent weeks, we have celebrated the virtues of the new ThinkPad X1 Fold. Christian Teismann talks about design and the story of layers that enhance durability and I personally spoke candidly about defining a category and expectations of foldable technology.

But as an engineer, I have been chasing higher degrees of device mobility for all of my career. We have discovered ways to reduce the impact or miniaturize just about every component of the systems except the display. The relentless progress of engineering has solved that limitation with the invention of the pOLED foldable display. Nevertheless, this raises completely new engineering headaches.

My favorite challenge that we overcame has been the marrying of the folding screen and the hinge. When you see a ThinkPad X1 Fold in person, take a look at that hinge: inside it has mechanisms that help it maintain the perfect radius needed to be able to open a folding display perfectly flat, while eliminating any creasing in the screen when folded. 

Being able to design and deliver a device that will delight users and add to their user experience always has to start with heavy-duty engineering challenges - this is the drawing to the ThinkPad X1 Fold hinge, and an early prototype. 

?As the hinge opens, it lengthens to just the right degree to hold the display in tension. That has been one of the biggest challenges – not just how to do this once but to create a perfectly flat display thousands of times that won't degrade in use, and most importantly to continue to provide the functionality that users will expect, to make this device something more than a novelty. If you want to learn more about how we did this, take a look at this video, which shows how Kazuo Fujii and the Yokohama engineering team behind the development of ThinkPad X1 Fold overcame these challenges.

The ThinkPad X1 Fold - unfolded. Spot the crease? No - there isn't one!

Other engineering solutions built into the ThinkPad X1 Fold are the way power and the Intel Core Processors with Hybrid Technology resources are deployed when in different modes - full-screen, half-screen, tablet modes - to save power and to make the technology that powers the device more effective and efficient. Again, a product like this that wastes power in different modes, or gets too hot, will not be a success in the market.

The evolution of folding computers

You can argue that folding devices have been on an evolution path that shows no sign of abating over a quarter of a century. It runs something like this:

• a device appears in an original form factor, the ThinkPad 700C
• cool things then happen to it - for example, a folding keyboard, new displays, CD drives, Wi-Fi, biometric security, touch screens
• those cool things then evolve and some even disappear in favor of new established standards
• finally, further generations of those cool things appear with well-defined purpose and benefits, as technology allows these to be developed.

The ThinkPad X1 Yoga.

In consumer circles, early adopters have always bought first, but as we've moved along that evolutionary line, that effect has diminished in favor of general users being far more tech-savvy and confident in buying early because their needs are now being addressed (and because the technology and scale now makes these products affordable).

The business world is seeing similar trends. IT departments have become accustomed to how technology in new forms improves business agility and a deeper understanding of rigorous reliability and durability testing of devices before they are commercialized builds greater trust. Businesses still require longer product lifecycles in order to manage deployment and capital expenditure, but generally we no longer "wait and see" when new laptops, smartphones or tablets are brought to market, as we did 10, 15 or 20+ years ago.

The user - their insights count

These products often start as expensive ideas but as a leader we must continue to push the boundaries of what we can build, leverage customer insight to decide on what we should build and then make them affordable. In fact, I often tell my team that it's easier to solve a cost problem than it is to solve an engineering problem.

The point of devices like the ThinkPad X1 Fold is that it allows users to have one device that covers everything they do, from watching Netflix on a tablet, to multitasking with email on one half and social media on the other half while on the move, to running a business on a full-function laptop.

Designing such a product is always an interactive process, of listening to customers, seeing their reactions, learning about how they use devices that fold, spotting what might still be improved, and continuing to develop and refine these devices in response to real needs.

You can only do that by investing in the original product and bringing it to market in enough numbers to allow these sorts of in-market experiences to be observed, and to provide valuable insight.

From cardboard to reality: as early facsimile models of the ThinkPad X1 Fold were taken around the world by Lenovo executives, reactions from audiences were fed back to the product design team. Needless to say, audience and user reactions were positive! This is my colleague Dilip Bhatia in Sydney, Australia in August 2019.

We've found over the past 25 years or so that pushing those boundaries, that impress and delight customers, develops trust in the minds of users. As Lenovo Corporate President and COO Gianfranco Lanci said recently in Forbes, this isn't about finding the next gimmick: It's about leveraging user input to push innovation forward.

I believe that is what ground-breaking devices have always really been about.