Lenovo put a foldable display on a gaming handheld. The Legion Go Fold Concept is a Windows-based handheld with a flexible POLED display, detachable Joy-Con-like controllers, and a folio case to turn the whole thing into a mini laptop.
You can use it as a standard Steam Deck-esque handheld with the display folded down to 7.7 inches and controllers attached at its sides, or you can unfold it for a bigger experience. When unfolded, the controllers can be repositioned to all four sides, allowing you to play with the screen in vertical or horizontal orientations.
In vertical splitscreen mode, you can put your game on one half of the screen and a second window (like your chat or game guide) on the other half. Horizontal fullscreen mode gives your game the full 11.6 inches of real estate in a 16:10 aspect ratio. To go into laptop mode, you remove the controllers and mount the handheld into a folio case with a stand, built-in keyboard, and trackpad. The controllers can be put into a separate grip mount to unify them as one gamepad.
There are a lot of ways you can use this folding handheld, including turning one of its controllers into a vertical mouse like on other Legion Go handhelds, but thereโs one thing it doesnโt do: fold down to close and protect its screen. The Go Fold only folds outwards, so donโt expect a Nintendo DS or GameBoy Advance-like clamshell that closes for portability. Instead, itโs all about getting bigger than your average gaming handheld and offering more. (Though weโve tried bigger before.)
The Legion Go Fold has some formidable specs: an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Lunar Lake processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and a 48Whr battery. The plastic-covered OLED has a resolution of 2435 x 1712 and 165Hz refresh rate. And thereโs even a second, circular toushscreen on the right controller, under the face buttons. It doubles as a touchpad and can be a support display, allowing you to swipe between extracted UI elements from a game (which I wouldnโt expect to be widely supported), a clock, system monitoring, or an animated GIF (just for fun).
During my brief in-person demo I didnโt get to play any graphically-intense games โ just Balatro, which can practically play on a potato. The screen looked plenty sharp, but like any foldable thereโs a crease down the middle; itโs very visible, but you learn to look past it and ignore it after just a bit. The build and feel of the whole thing felt a little fragile, and detaching and reattaching the controllers was definitely janky. Build quality will hopefully be improved if this device ever actually makes it to market.
The laptop mode was a pleasant surprise for me though. I did not expect a gaming handheld to double as a conventional computer you could get work done on. The Legion Go Foldโs case took quite a bit of fumbling before I set it up correctly, but it shouldnโt take too long to get used to if you actually lived with it.
Then again, I donโt know if anyone is going to be able to live with this thing โ ever. Iโd love for the Legion Go Fold to go from concept to real product like other out-there Lenovo ideas, but I shudder to think what it might cost. The Legion Go 2 is already priced well over $1,000. And with the ongoing RAMageddon crisis weโre living through, thereโs no telling how much more expensive an actual Legion Go Fold would be if it came out in a year or more.
But even if itโs not the kind of foldable I expected, and even though it may never come out, itโs certainly cool. Now somebody please make a folding PC handheld that goes from kinda-big to really small. I think thatโd be the one for me.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
