The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is proof that a foldable tablet/laptop is a better idea than a foldable phone

Posted on 01/09/2022 by Sarang Sheth

“The single biggest challenge is the screen itself”, says Kevin Beck, Senior Story Technologist at Lenovo (although I’m not entirely sure what that title means). Beck’s statement is rather revealing, as it’s a complete affirmation of the fact that a folding laptop/tablet is a MUCH better idea than a folding phone. Phones are used/opened hundreds of times each day, compounding to thousands of times in just two weeks alone. Laptops/tablets, on the other hand, are ‘opened’ much less often, which translates to a dramatic decrease in the stress taken by a folding display. Moreover, laptops and tablets can usually afford to be thicker than phones, which gives you a lot of leeway to build a better hinge that can withstand friction, and constant folding, and is therefore built to last for years.

Meet the ThinkPad X1 Fold from Lenovo, a laptop-tablet hybrid that celebrates its foldability. In a world where MacBooks don’t look like books, we’ve got ourselves a ThinkPad that opens like one! Now in its second iteration, the ‘next gen’ Thinkpad X1 Fold sports a slimmer design with thinner bezels and a much larger screen with a 16-inch diagonal (as compared to the 13.3-inch one on the previous ThinkPad X1 Fold from 2020). The tablet folds right down the center, sort of like a book, giving you a slim device that’s easy to carry and versatile enough to be used in a variety of formats. You can use it as a tablet in conjunction with a stylus, or fold it in an L-shaped format and use it as you would a laptop… albeit with a touchscreen keyboard underneath your fingertips. If you want a more analog experience, there’s a mechanical keyboard attachment too that wirelessly connects to your X1 Fold, and a stand that you can prop your device onto, turning it into sort of a desktop-style experience.

Designer: Lenovo

On paper, the ThinkPad X1 Fold boasts some rather commendable specs. It sports a 12th Gen Intel Core i7 processor on the inside, with the ability to go up to 32GB LPDDR5 memory and 1TB storage. The 16.3-inch OLED display has a 4:3 resolution when completely open, bringing it to 3:2 when folded in half (that’s 15:10, which is just about comparable to the 16:9 aspect ratio found on regular laptops). The X1 Fold can be used solo or configured with an optional magnetic-attach pen utilizing Wacom protocol for a true tablet-esque experience. For laptop-lovers who need a tactile keyboard, the ThinkPad X1 Fold offers an optional full-size backlit ThinkPad keyboard, with TrackPoint and
large haptic touchpad.

The beauty of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold lies in its versatility. The company touts that the device can be used in 5 different modes – the clamshell laptop mode, landscape ‘desktop’ mode with the keyboard, portrait desktop mode with the keyboard (a unique template that Lenovo claims really excited early users), book mode, and finally tablet mode with either the touchscreen input or the stylus. “Productivity, collaboration, content consumption, reading, writing, editing, and so on are all a breeze in whichever mode one feels most comfortable with”, Lenovo says. “The modes are managed by an intuitive Mode Switcher interface”

The hybrid folding tablet comes with a camera array that’s placed on the shorter edge of the bezel (sort of like on the iPad). This means it faces you when you’re using it in laptop mode. Multiple microphones placed along the sides of the bezel help with orientation and spatial awareness, allowing the X1 Fold to be used in a variety of ways.

The one largest drawback with a 16-inch folding tablet is the battery life, given that it’s powering such a massive display. The ThinkPad X1 Fold comes with a 48Wh battery on the inside that is intelligently managed by the tablet’s chip to optimize performance based on usage. When left idle, the X1 Fold’s display automatically dims to save battery, and when you walk away from the device, the screen automatically shuts off, saving power. It even auto-wakes when you return, so you can pick up right where you left off.

With all those impressive specs and abilities, the ThinkPad X1 Fold won’t come cheap. It begins shipping in November with a starting price of $2499. Higher specs will cost you more, and the keyboard, stand, and stylus are sold as optional accessories.

The price, however high it may be, is a factor of exactly how impressive and innovative this little gizmo is. Folding displays aren’t quite mainstream yet, and folding laptop/tablets are practically inexistent as a category barring a few models. The ThinkPad X1 Fold hopes to pave the way to a future where such devices are much more commonplace, resulting in a robust supply chain and eventually… eventually, a lower price tag!

The post The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is proof that a foldable tablet/laptop is a better idea than a foldable phone first appeared on Yanko Design.

Tech’s biggest losers in 2020

Posted on 15/12/2020 by Engadget

It’d be easy to just say all of 2020 was terrible and call it a day. But while most of the year was awful for everyone, some things in tech suffered more than others. TikTok, for example, got jerked around by the Trump administration for months, only...

Lenovo’s Thinkpad X1 Fold is available for pre-order starting at $2,499

Posted on 29/09/2020 by Engadget RSS Feed

After five years of development, Lenovo is almost ready to start shipping the Thinkpad X1 Fold, which it claims is the first PC with a foldable display. It has opened up pre-orders for the device, which starts at $2,499.The Thinkpad X1 Fold has a 13....

Lenovo made a genius move by building a folding tablet first, and not a folding smartphone

Posted on 09/01/2020 by Sarang Sheth

You’ve got to learn to walk before you learn to run. While that handy proverb wasn’t initially crafted for leaps and bounds in technological advancement, it holds exceedingly true for the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold – a tablet PC with a flexible folding display.

I imagine the first thoughts I had when I saw the ThinkPad X1 Fold were vastly different from Lenovo’s when they first conceptualized this folding beauty. Lenovo’s video talks a lot about design and engineering, about durability, and about how Lenovo set out to, in 2015, bend the part of the laptop that would never bend. In quite a few ways, the video is a lot like Samsung’s video, or Motorola’s video. It talks about cutting edge innovation, company values, a new sort of technology and construction, and about how the product was designed for the average consumer. The video, however, doesn’t talk about what a sensible idea it was to launch a folding tablet before you launch a folding smartphone (if that even occurred to them). The ThinkPad X1 Fold, even if unintentionally, is a great way to beta-test folding displays, and even though Lenovo isn’t in the phone business, the lessons it will acquire from building, launching, and observing people use this tablet, will be incredibly valuable to the smartphone industry and to the end-consumer. Here’s what I mean.

1. A small audience is a better audience.

Tablet sales aren’t as high as smartphone sales in any given quarter of any year. Since less people are buying tablets than they’re buying smartphones, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold has the advantage of being released to a far smaller, more focused group of people, making it ideal for testing the market without potentially making losses in millions if something were to go wrong. The avid consumer doesn’t change tablets as often as they change smartphones too, so Lenovo has the comfort of knowing that someone who buys the X1 Fold will use it for at least 3-4 years instead of buying a new one after a year. This prolonged usage cycle allows Lenovo to really see if any issues develop over years of use.

2. We’ve reached peak smartphone size. The tablet, however, can expand.

Remember the term phablets? Remember the massive smartphones Samsung used to launch in the 2011-14 period, that looked absolutely weird when iPhones weren’t more than 3-4 inches in screen size? Phablets are a normal thing now. We just call them XL phones, and most users will still testify to how difficult it is to reach the top left corner (or the back button) while using only one hand. Smartphones, and this is purely my opinion here, don’t really need to expand beyond a 6-inch screen, but tablets can, because the tablet has always been a two-hand device from the get-go. A bigger screen makes it great for multitasking (something that tablets can do VERY well) and for watching media (something people inevitably use tablets for). Given that tablets are often considered laptop replacements, the tablet screen can very easily expand up to 15.6 inches without proving to be a hassle. And this leads me to my next point.

3. A folding tablet’s hinge is more favorable than a folding smartphone’s hinge.

On average, people look at their smartphone 110 times a day. The average number of times someone unlocks their tablet is 20, which means a folding tablet’s hinge would be used over 80% less on a daily basis as compared to a folding smartphone. You’ve got to learn to walk before you learn to run.

Even though tablets are often used for longer periods of time (if you’re working or watching a movie) than a smartphone, that hinge would easily go through MUCH less abuse on a tablet. Besides, tablets don’t need to be as thin as smartphones… You never carry a tablet in your pocket. It’s much more socially and personally acceptable to carry a slightly thicker tablet than it is a thicker phone. Put a folding display on a tablet and you can afford to build a stronger, thicker hinge that will undoubtedly last longer because more people accidentally drop or sit on their phone than they sit on a tablet. Whether Lenovo did this deliberately or by accident, they gave the folding display a much better home.

4. Semantically, a folding tablet looks like a book

Given its larger size and proximity in shape and form to an actual book, the folding tablet makes an incredibly good e-book reader. The spine of the tablet literally resembles the spine of a book, and the fact that Lenovo includes a stylus with the ThinkPad X1 Fold just makes it a great electronic notebook, giving it a much more defined sense of purpose than a folding smartphone… So even if the ThinkPad X1 Fold doesn’t sell as much as the Galaxy Fold or the Moto Razr 2019 (and as I mentioned at the beginning of my article, it won’t), if Lenovo’s built a device as great as they claim, their users will be vastly happier than the guys who lined up to pay over $2,000 for a folding Samsung mobile phone.