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Buy a ThinkPad X1 Fold for the Same Reason as a Z Fold
Notebook by day, tablet by night. The ThinkPad X1 Fold looks like something from a luxury stationery store from the outside. Crack the cover open and the eyes are treated to a gorgeous 13-inch flexible OLED display.
Imprinted in the leather cover is a familiar ThinkPad X1 logo, lacking only the illuminated "i". On the front is a thin glass panel; when the X1 Fold is opened, the leather from the spine stretches to cover that glossy surface. The black glass is a clever design element that adds a touch of class to the tablet when closed and vanishes to fully leather back in tablet mode. It's a beautiful combination of materials and the fit and finish is superb. The real magic happens when the X1 Fold is opened, and the flexible OLED display appears. When unfolded, the flat screen is 13.3 inches. Bordering the screen are thick bezels, kept chunky in order to protect the display and also gripable in tablet mode. The soft-touch rubber material Lenovo used for the borders is a nice touch.
On the rear of the X1 Fold is a kickstand, enabled by a hinge that runs diagonally along the back cover. Prying a finger between the leather and metal opens the flap, revealing a plush red felt on the inside of the kickstand. The stand is stiff enough to hold the tablet in both vertical and horizontal orientations, but the X1 Fold isn't practical to use on any non-flat surface. The tablet will wobble or sit off-kilter on your lap or any uneven furniture, like a couch. The same problem exists with the Surface Pro series although the kickstand on those models is better at balancing the screen. The best way to use the X1 Fold is with the keyboard on the lower half of the X1 Fold and the screen folded in a 90-degree angle, similar to a clamshell laptop. The problem with this method is that your screen real estate gets cut in half.
Another issue is that the area between the screen and bezel, as well as the seam between the bezel and outer frame, collect particles. Those tight areas are difficult to clean and therefore to overlook the grime. The main benefit of a foldable display is to reduce the footprint of the tablet. The X1 Fold achieves that, measuring 9.3 inches tall and only 6.3 inches wide when folded versus 11.8 inches wide when unfolded.
The X1 Fold is thick. At 2.2 pounds and 0.5 inches in tablet mode, the Fold is already thicker than the Apple's iPad Pro (12.9-inch) (11 x 8.4 x 0.2 inches, 1.4 pounds), the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (11.5 x 7.9 x 0.3 inches, 1.7 pounds, and the Dell XPS 13 (11.6 x 7.8 x 0.6 inches, 2.8 pounds). Close the notebook and the thickness goes to 1.1 inches, or gaming laptop territory. The ThinkPad promise of military-grade durability remains uncompromised. Despite being a first-gen product, the X1 Fold survived 12 MIL-STD-810G-rated tests. The build quality of this foldable device is impressive, especially after seeing other failed first attempts at making foldables. The X1 Fold was silent when opening and closing — no creaking, cracking or other cringe-inducing noises, only the snapping sound when the two halves meet. Opening the device reveals an engineer's dream — the mechanisms found within seem capable of launching a spacecraft. After testing six different designs, Lenovo landed on a multi-link torque hinge mechanism that manages stress when the PC is folded. Keeping the screen from permanently creasing or scratching are carbon-fiber-reinforced plates that have gone through "extensive durability testing" to ensure the tablet can withstand hard taps and even drops. Lenovo didn't just make the world's first folding PC reliable, it made it down-right durable. If Samsung had put as much painstaking detail into the first Galaxy Fold, maybe foldables wouldn't have had such a rocky start. There are two USB-C ports on the X1 Fold. One is located on the bottom of the front cover, or the bottom-left edge when opened. The other USB port is on the right edge of the cover toward the bottom, or the lower-left edge of the tablet when opened and viewed in the horizontal orientation. An optional SIM card slot is located on the right edge of the front cover below the speaker grille. There is no headphone jack or SD card reader.
It's one thing to dazzle at the beauty of an OLED TV from the other side of your living room. It's an entirely different experience to hold this breathtaking display technology in the palm of your hand and interact with it by touch.
Now, about the crease. It does exist. It has to otherwise the plastic will permanently fold. But because the multi-link hinge keeps the OLED screen perfectly flat, the crease is so subtle the crease is not noticeable when the pixels beneath illuminated. Put the X1 Fold to sleep and two lines running vertically up to the screen where they fold at the spine appear . Crease or not, the screen is absolutely mesmerizing. The Lasso of Truth pierced my corneas as it zipped across the screen like a golden lightning bolt in the trailer for Wonder Woman 1984. The superhero's red chrome armor was as vibrant as a freshly painted car while the pastel blues and pinks in a funky t-shirt worn by Chris Pine gave me nostalgia for the fearless fashion of the mid-'80s. The panel is also detailed; I could see individual leaves in miniature trees lining the red carpet at a posh event, and spotted veins bursting from Gal Gadot's neck as she hurled her lasso.
What's more problematic than any creasing is the panel's glossy finish. The plastic shimmers against any light source, so although it gets bright and has unrivaled contrast, using the ThinkPad X1 Fold outside under the Texas sun wasn't ideal. I could still see the beautiful colors, and webpages were still legible, but my portrait was staring right back at me from the glossy laminated layer. A colorimeter showed the X1 Fold's display covers 104% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, making it much more colorful than the panels on the XPS 13 (81%), Surface Pro 7 (69%), the iPad Pro (87%) and the category average (86%). As gorgeous as it is, the OLED display reaches only 301 nits. The XPS 13 (469 nits), iPad Pro (559 nits) and Surface Pro 7 (395 nits) all outshone the Lenovo, which didn't even reach the 387-nit average.
Dual speakers are positioned on the front cover, or on the left edge when opened in the horizontal orientation. They sound fine, but a quad setup would be an improvement. The X1 Fold was fine for listening to commentary, but a Bluetooth speaker is needed for music lovers. The on-screen keyboards take some getting used to as they may pop-up at the right times then awkwardly tap away at a vertical piece of glass (or plastic, in this case). Lenovo created a custom keyboard just for this device called the Fold Mini Keyboard. There are lots of pros and cons, but overall, it's a useful accessory that could use some fine-tuning.
The keyboard enables the X1 Fold to be used as a laptop. Cleverly placed magnets allow the keyboard to remain suspended on one half of the screen while the other acts as a primary display when the system is folded at a 90-degree angle. The hinge is strong enough that you don't need to use the kickstand to keep the display portion from falling down. Moreover, the keyboard nests nicely inside the folded tablet, filling the gap between both displays while wirelessly charging its battery. When the full 13.3-inch display is needed, the Fold Mini must be detached from the screen and replaced ty a regular Bluetooth keyboard. Pairing the keyboard to the X1 Fold is effortless, and the keys themselves have a pleasant clickiness.
The keyboard is small and will feel cramped for those with large hands. There are a few undersized keys and no backlighting. The keyboard is sold separately for $299, a little much when the laptop costs $2,500.
The touchpad is not practical, but I don’t like touchpads in the first place. . The miniature rectangle has room for only two fingers, making it tricky to use for anything beyond moving the cursor. And while the smooth, soft-touch material feels great and even responds quickly, there's no point in trying any fancy gestures. The other custom-build accessory sold alongside (not included with) the ThinkPad X1 Fold is the Mode Pen. Yep, Lenovo (unlike Samsung) figured out stylus support on a flexible display. The pen is comfortable to hold but learning how to draw straight lines in 3D Paint takes time. On the side of the stylus are two buttons that can be customized in the Lenovo Pen Settings app. Removing the cap reveals a USB-C charging port, which gets 250 minutes of use from 15 minutes of charge or a month of drawing from a 2-hour charge. When finished using the Mod Pen, a loop in the keyboard accessory acts as a useful storage spot.
Lenovo positions the ThinkPad X1 Fold as being capable of replacing not just your tablet, but also your laptop. The X1 Fold can be used as a standard tablet with the device unfolded entirely and the screen stretched flat. To read a book or multiple documents, the X1 Fold can be bent to create a left and right half. The X1 comes with an Intel Core i5-L16G7 CPU, the most premium of Intel's Lakefield family, and the smallest x86 processor around. A hybrid chip, it uses a unique "Foveros 3D stacking" technique that stacks two logical dies and two layers of DRAM. Doing the heavy lifting is a single 10-nanometer core while four low-power cores work in the background for efficiency during less intensive tasks. The design goal is to give the X1 Fold enough performance to run multiple apps, but with an efficient chip that ensures the tablet can deliver long battery life. In practice, the Core i5-L16G7 does reasonably well with performance but struggles with endurance.
The X1 Fold paired with 8GB of RAM did a good job in real-world testing. Loaded with two dozen RAM-hungry Google Chrome tabs, two of which streamed Twitch videos while another pair played YouTube clips. In tablet mode, it didn't freeze or crash, even when with 10 more home listings during a real estate search. Graphics and text took a few extra measures to fully render, but the performance was solid. Some apps loaded slowly due to the sluggishness of Windows 10 Pro. Switching from portrait to landscape mode takes a full 3 seconds, and the display occasionally defaulted to portrait mode even when held horizontally. There was some screen flickering and the infrequent bug when pulling up the search bar or Start Menu. These faults can’t be attributed to the X1 Fold, but they are nonetheless annoying.
Lenovo outfitted the X1 Fold with a relatively speedy 256GB SSD, which duplicated a 5GB multimedia file in 11 seconds at a rate of 444.6 megabytes per second. That outpaces the Surface Pro 7 (267.9 MBps, 256GB SSD) but lags behind the XPS 13 (729.3 MBps, 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD) and the average (810.4 MBps). AAA games won’t run well on the ThinkPad X1 Fold. Apps will run fine but gamers will want a proper gaming laptop or console to play Cyberpunk 2077 whenever it finally arrives. When it comes to battery life, the X1 Fold has a lot going against it. OLED display? Yes. Thin, compact form factor? Yes. Full Windows 10? Yes. The X1 Fold lasted for 6 hours and 3 minutes on a battery test that the Surface Pro 7 (7:30) lasted longer on a charge while the iPad Pro (10:16) and Dell XPS 13 (12:39) stayed powered for several additional hours.
There are no rear-facing cameras on the X1 Fold, only a 5-megapixel camera for selfies and video conferencing. The camera, in less-than-ideal lighting, photos and videos look poor so photos need a well-lit room. Lenovo Camera Settings is pretty self-explanatory. It's a basic app changes the orientation of the camera preview and enables noise reduction software in low light (the results are nothing to write home about). And lastly, Lenovo Voice is a voice translator that did a solid job of translating my rusty German into English. Lenovo ships the X1 Fold with a one-year warranty.
While the X1 Fold works well as a tablet, spending $2,500 on a device with so many shortcomings as a laptop replacement is not justified. Battery life, at 6 hours, is a major setback, software quirks get in the way of productivity, and the X1 Fold's performance can't compete with other laptops in this price range.
Notebook by day, tablet by night. The ThinkPad X1 Fold looks like something from a luxury stationery store from the outside. Crack the cover open and the eyes are treated to a gorgeous 13-inch flexible OLED display.
Imprinted in the leather cover is a familiar ThinkPad X1 logo, lacking only the illuminated "i". On the front is a thin glass panel; when the X1 Fold is opened, the leather from the spine stretches to cover that glossy surface. The black glass is a clever design element that adds a touch of class to the tablet when closed and vanishes to fully leather back in tablet mode. It's a beautiful combination of materials and the fit and finish is superb. The real magic happens when the X1 Fold is opened, and the flexible OLED display appears. When unfolded, the flat screen is 13.3 inches. Bordering the screen are thick bezels, kept chunky in order to protect the display and also gripable in tablet mode. The soft-touch rubber material Lenovo used for the borders is a nice touch.
On the rear of the X1 Fold is a kickstand, enabled by a hinge that runs diagonally along the back cover. Prying a finger between the leather and metal opens the flap, revealing a plush red felt on the inside of the kickstand. The stand is stiff enough to hold the tablet in both vertical and horizontal orientations, but the X1 Fold isn't practical to use on any non-flat surface. The tablet will wobble or sit off-kilter on your lap or any uneven furniture, like a couch. The same problem exists with the Surface Pro series although the kickstand on those models is better at balancing the screen. The best way to use the X1 Fold is with the keyboard on the lower half of the X1 Fold and the screen folded in a 90-degree angle, similar to a clamshell laptop. The problem with this method is that your screen real estate gets cut in half.
Another issue is that the area between the screen and bezel, as well as the seam between the bezel and outer frame, collect particles. Those tight areas are difficult to clean and therefore to overlook the grime. The main benefit of a foldable display is to reduce the footprint of the tablet. The X1 Fold achieves that, measuring 9.3 inches tall and only 6.3 inches wide when folded versus 11.8 inches wide when unfolded.
The X1 Fold is thick. At 2.2 pounds and 0.5 inches in tablet mode, the Fold is already thicker than the Apple's iPad Pro (12.9-inch) (11 x 8.4 x 0.2 inches, 1.4 pounds), the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (11.5 x 7.9 x 0.3 inches, 1.7 pounds, and the Dell XPS 13 (11.6 x 7.8 x 0.6 inches, 2.8 pounds). Close the notebook and the thickness goes to 1.1 inches, or gaming laptop territory. The ThinkPad promise of military-grade durability remains uncompromised. Despite being a first-gen product, the X1 Fold survived 12 MIL-STD-810G-rated tests. The build quality of this foldable device is impressive, especially after seeing other failed first attempts at making foldables. The X1 Fold was silent when opening and closing — no creaking, cracking or other cringe-inducing noises, only the snapping sound when the two halves meet. Opening the device reveals an engineer's dream — the mechanisms found within seem capable of launching a spacecraft. After testing six different designs, Lenovo landed on a multi-link torque hinge mechanism that manages stress when the PC is folded. Keeping the screen from permanently creasing or scratching are carbon-fiber-reinforced plates that have gone through "extensive durability testing" to ensure the tablet can withstand hard taps and even drops. Lenovo didn't just make the world's first folding PC reliable, it made it down-right durable. If Samsung had put as much painstaking detail into the first Galaxy Fold, maybe foldables wouldn't have had such a rocky start. There are two USB-C ports on the X1 Fold. One is located on the bottom of the front cover, or the bottom-left edge when opened. The other USB port is on the right edge of the cover toward the bottom, or the lower-left edge of the tablet when opened and viewed in the horizontal orientation. An optional SIM card slot is located on the right edge of the front cover below the speaker grille. There is no headphone jack or SD card reader.
It's one thing to dazzle at the beauty of an OLED TV from the other side of your living room. It's an entirely different experience to hold this breathtaking display technology in the palm of your hand and interact with it by touch.
Now, about the crease. It does exist. It has to otherwise the plastic will permanently fold. But because the multi-link hinge keeps the OLED screen perfectly flat, the crease is so subtle the crease is not noticeable when the pixels beneath illuminated. Put the X1 Fold to sleep and two lines running vertically up to the screen where they fold at the spine appear . Crease or not, the screen is absolutely mesmerizing. The Lasso of Truth pierced my corneas as it zipped across the screen like a golden lightning bolt in the trailer for Wonder Woman 1984. The superhero's red chrome armor was as vibrant as a freshly painted car while the pastel blues and pinks in a funky t-shirt worn by Chris Pine gave me nostalgia for the fearless fashion of the mid-'80s. The panel is also detailed; I could see individual leaves in miniature trees lining the red carpet at a posh event, and spotted veins bursting from Gal Gadot's neck as she hurled her lasso.
What's more problematic than any creasing is the panel's glossy finish. The plastic shimmers against any light source, so although it gets bright and has unrivaled contrast, using the ThinkPad X1 Fold outside under the Texas sun wasn't ideal. I could still see the beautiful colors, and webpages were still legible, but my portrait was staring right back at me from the glossy laminated layer. A colorimeter showed the X1 Fold's display covers 104% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, making it much more colorful than the panels on the XPS 13 (81%), Surface Pro 7 (69%), the iPad Pro (87%) and the category average (86%). As gorgeous as it is, the OLED display reaches only 301 nits. The XPS 13 (469 nits), iPad Pro (559 nits) and Surface Pro 7 (395 nits) all outshone the Lenovo, which didn't even reach the 387-nit average.
Dual speakers are positioned on the front cover, or on the left edge when opened in the horizontal orientation. They sound fine, but a quad setup would be an improvement. The X1 Fold was fine for listening to commentary, but a Bluetooth speaker is needed for music lovers. The on-screen keyboards take some getting used to as they may pop-up at the right times then awkwardly tap away at a vertical piece of glass (or plastic, in this case). Lenovo created a custom keyboard just for this device called the Fold Mini Keyboard. There are lots of pros and cons, but overall, it's a useful accessory that could use some fine-tuning.
The keyboard enables the X1 Fold to be used as a laptop. Cleverly placed magnets allow the keyboard to remain suspended on one half of the screen while the other acts as a primary display when the system is folded at a 90-degree angle. The hinge is strong enough that you don't need to use the kickstand to keep the display portion from falling down. Moreover, the keyboard nests nicely inside the folded tablet, filling the gap between both displays while wirelessly charging its battery. When the full 13.3-inch display is needed, the Fold Mini must be detached from the screen and replaced ty a regular Bluetooth keyboard. Pairing the keyboard to the X1 Fold is effortless, and the keys themselves have a pleasant clickiness.
The keyboard is small and will feel cramped for those with large hands. There are a few undersized keys and no backlighting. The keyboard is sold separately for $299, a little much when the laptop costs $2,500.
The touchpad is not practical, but I don’t like touchpads in the first place. . The miniature rectangle has room for only two fingers, making it tricky to use for anything beyond moving the cursor. And while the smooth, soft-touch material feels great and even responds quickly, there's no point in trying any fancy gestures. The other custom-build accessory sold alongside (not included with) the ThinkPad X1 Fold is the Mode Pen. Yep, Lenovo (unlike Samsung) figured out stylus support on a flexible display. The pen is comfortable to hold but learning how to draw straight lines in 3D Paint takes time. On the side of the stylus are two buttons that can be customized in the Lenovo Pen Settings app. Removing the cap reveals a USB-C charging port, which gets 250 minutes of use from 15 minutes of charge or a month of drawing from a 2-hour charge. When finished using the Mod Pen, a loop in the keyboard accessory acts as a useful storage spot.
Lenovo positions the ThinkPad X1 Fold as being capable of replacing not just your tablet, but also your laptop. The X1 Fold can be used as a standard tablet with the device unfolded entirely and the screen stretched flat. To read a book or multiple documents, the X1 Fold can be bent to create a left and right half. The X1 comes with an Intel Core i5-L16G7 CPU, the most premium of Intel's Lakefield family, and the smallest x86 processor around. A hybrid chip, it uses a unique "Foveros 3D stacking" technique that stacks two logical dies and two layers of DRAM. Doing the heavy lifting is a single 10-nanometer core while four low-power cores work in the background for efficiency during less intensive tasks. The design goal is to give the X1 Fold enough performance to run multiple apps, but with an efficient chip that ensures the tablet can deliver long battery life. In practice, the Core i5-L16G7 does reasonably well with performance but struggles with endurance.
The X1 Fold paired with 8GB of RAM did a good job in real-world testing. Loaded with two dozen RAM-hungry Google Chrome tabs, two of which streamed Twitch videos while another pair played YouTube clips. In tablet mode, it didn't freeze or crash, even when with 10 more home listings during a real estate search. Graphics and text took a few extra measures to fully render, but the performance was solid. Some apps loaded slowly due to the sluggishness of Windows 10 Pro. Switching from portrait to landscape mode takes a full 3 seconds, and the display occasionally defaulted to portrait mode even when held horizontally. There was some screen flickering and the infrequent bug when pulling up the search bar or Start Menu. These faults can’t be attributed to the X1 Fold, but they are nonetheless annoying.
Lenovo outfitted the X1 Fold with a relatively speedy 256GB SSD, which duplicated a 5GB multimedia file in 11 seconds at a rate of 444.6 megabytes per second. That outpaces the Surface Pro 7 (267.9 MBps, 256GB SSD) but lags behind the XPS 13 (729.3 MBps, 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD) and the average (810.4 MBps). AAA games won’t run well on the ThinkPad X1 Fold. Apps will run fine but gamers will want a proper gaming laptop or console to play Cyberpunk 2077 whenever it finally arrives. When it comes to battery life, the X1 Fold has a lot going against it. OLED display? Yes. Thin, compact form factor? Yes. Full Windows 10? Yes. The X1 Fold lasted for 6 hours and 3 minutes on a battery test that the Surface Pro 7 (7:30) lasted longer on a charge while the iPad Pro (10:16) and Dell XPS 13 (12:39) stayed powered for several additional hours.
There are no rear-facing cameras on the X1 Fold, only a 5-megapixel camera for selfies and video conferencing. The camera, in less-than-ideal lighting, photos and videos look poor so photos need a well-lit room. Lenovo Camera Settings is pretty self-explanatory. It's a basic app changes the orientation of the camera preview and enables noise reduction software in low light (the results are nothing to write home about). And lastly, Lenovo Voice is a voice translator that did a solid job of translating my rusty German into English. Lenovo ships the X1 Fold with a one-year warranty.
While the X1 Fold works well as a tablet, spending $2,500 on a device with so many shortcomings as a laptop replacement is not justified. Battery life, at 6 hours, is a major setback, software quirks get in the way of productivity, and the X1 Fold's performance can't compete with other laptops in this price range.
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