Windows gaming handhelds are having a moment, as the form factor conveniently lets you enjoy your PC game library away from your desk. Lenovo’s been cooking up solid options for a couple of years now – but its latest concept may be the most compelling hardware for multitaskers like me.
At the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade expo, the company showed off the Legion Go Fold Concept: a Windows tablet that you can slot between a pair of controllers in a variety of ways for however you feel like playing. You can fold it in half for a compact 7.7-inch screen – roughly the same as most handhelds – or expand it to its full 11.6-inch size for a larger display.
In the lattermost configuration, you’re getting much more screen real estate than most of the current crop of handhelds. So now you have the option to kick back on your couch with a small device for beat-em-ups like Absolum, or get a good look at everything going on in your field of view for FPS titles with the unfolded display.
I frequently switch between using my phone and an iPad to stream PC games and play using a telescopic controller that stretches to accommodate either device between the controls. It sure is nice to have everything appear a good bit larger on the iPad when I’m playing more engaging titles – so the Go Fold concept makes a ton of sense to me.
You can even fold out the display and orient it vertically for a dual screen experience, which might be fun while emulating retro dual-screen games, or play bullet hell titles in portrait mode like Sky Force Reloaded. You could even have your game running on the top half, and have a walkthrough or live stream running in the bottom half.
And now for the part that makes me feel like I might actually get a lot of mileage out of this: the Go Fold is meant to come with a kickstand and a detachable keyboard that snaps in place at the bottom, so it effectively turns into an 11.6-inch Windows laptop. A small one, but a laptop nonetheless. That means I can take this baby on the road for getting light work done and have a capable gaming device to boot.
Lenovo
Lenovo’s also leaning on its previous innovations in this space for the Go Fold’s design. The controller halves are mounted on sliding rails. If you want to place the tablet on a desk, you can simply detach the halves, and fit them to a connector accessory in the middle so the three pieces together become a wireless gamepad, separate from the tablet. The Go Fold weighs in at 30.6 oz (868 g), controllers and all.
Lenovo
The controllers have a lot more going on than you might imagine. There are trigger stops, so you can switch between instant response for shooters and action games, or more nuanced input for racing titles. You’ll also notice a little circular display on the right controller half that shows CPU stats and the time. It can also serve as a trackpad and a shortcut hotkey.
There’s also a scroll wheel on there, the purpose of which hasn’t been detailed, but it could be a handy way to quickly toggle brightness or volume in the heat of battle. And finally, as with Legion Go 2, the right controller can be docked into an accessory and used as a vertical grip mouse for FPS and strategy games.
Lenovo
This is still a concept, so the specs haven’t been fully detailed, and the few we know of aren’t final. The model shown off at MWC had an 16:10 OLED display, a Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chip on board, along with 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage. That’s a slightly older Lunar Lake processor, and there’s no separate GPU inside, so you can expect this to run most games in low to medium graphics settings.
That said, Lenovo has quickly turned its wild and unique concepts into actual products in the past, so it’s not unreasonable to expect this one could actually go into production. At that point, it could well get beefier internals depending on what Intel comes up with for compact devices by then, as well as the state of RAM prices (which are currently astronomical).
The plain vanilla Legion Go S with its standard screen and mid-range componentry comes in just under US$800, so I’d expect this to command a premium for the folding build, and hit a $1,000+ price point. Fingers crossed this comes to a store shelf near you in the near future at any rate.
Source: Lenovo
