I spent the last week traveling with Lenovo’s foldable laptop, the ThinkPad X1 Fold 16, and I was impressed with its versatility. The screen folds in half, and you can put a keyboard on top of it, so it works like a 12.5-inch laptop. That’s small enough to fit well on an airplane tray table, even when the passenger in front has their seat fully reclined. When I got to my hotel, I could unfold the screen and utilize the full 16-inch display, in either vertical or horizontal orientation. Of course, the larger screen was better for watching videos (in horizontal or landscape mode), scrolling web pages, and word processing (in vertical or portrait mode).The X1 Fold is not the first laptop I’ve tested that does this (last fall, I tried out HP’s Spectre Foldable PC, which is based on a similar concept), but it’s certainly an interesting one.The X1 Fold 16 is an improvement on previous foldable ThinkPad designs. The basic display is a 16.3-inch touch OLED with 2560-by-2024 resolution in a 4:3 ratio with up to 400 nits. The display has a new hinge that folds flat, which makes it relatively easy to pack with the keyboard. You can use the display full size, in either landscape or portrait mode, using a stand that holds the display up and also acts as a cover for the keyboard when it is not in use. (The stand worked well, but I preferred the way HP builds a stand into the back of the display itself; it’s one less piece to carry.) One thing I appreciated was that the fold in the screen seemed less noticeable than on previous foldable laptops I’ve seen.
(Credit: Lenovo)
The ThinkPad X1 Fold measures 6.94 x 10.87 x 0.69 inches when folded, and 13.61 x 10.87 x 0.34 inches when open. The computer weighs 2.83 pounds, and the keyboard and stand combination brings it up to 4.23 pounds. Add in the small 65-watt charger and the total is 4.77 pounds. It’s notably heavier than a typical 13- or 14-inch thin-and-light notebook, but reasonable when compared with 16-inch laptops, which typically come with much larger and heavier chargers (Lenovo’s 16-inch ThinkPad P1 weighs 6.1 pounds with the charger). It isn’t the easiest notebook to travel with, but it’s pretty good given the screen size, and of course, it adds a lot of flexibility you don’t get with the typical 16-inch machine (though this lacks the discrete graphics common in the larger laptops).When you use it as a 12.5-inch notebook, it has an unusual 2024-by-1240 resolution (set by default to 200%), which means that, in general, you’re not going to want to have Word’s navigation pane or Outlook’s calendar pane opened when reading emails. When you carry it, you fold the keyboard into the stand and the combination magnetically attaches to the bottom of the folded display, resulting in what looks like a thicker 12-inch notebook. If you don’t want to carry the physical keyboard, use an on-screen keyboard (in practice, I much prefer real keyboards).The keyboard can be connected to the display via a USB-C cable (which also charges it), or via Bluetooth, both of which worked well. Just placing the keyboard on the display resizes Windows to accommodate it, so you can use it as a notebook. It resembles typical ThinkPad keyboards, with a red TrackPoint pointing stick in the center. To accommodate the smaller size, everything seems a bit more cramped. The function keys are notably smaller, and the 1.97-by-4.33-inch touchpad is tiny compared to what you’ll see on most machines.You can also use the X1 Fold as a big tablet with a touch display for reading, drawing, or annotating using an optional active pen that magnetically attaches to the side. I’m not an artist, but it seemed to work well.
Lenovo includes the basic software it does with the most recent ThinkPads I’ve tested. Double tapping the familiar TrackPoint pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard brings up a Quick Menu that lets you control microphone settings, choose your output device, and start using your voice to type into a text box. It’s an interesting collection of options, and I can see where it could be useful, although I didn’t use it much.The unit came with a 5-megapixel camera, which generally looked pretty good. The camera does not have a physical shutter. It worked well with Windows Hello for signing in. The machine also has a fingerprint reader on the keyboard for Windows Hello.I did notice one issue. When using Zoom, sometimes the image from the camera would be 90 degrees off. You can fix this under the Zoom settings menu if you’re logged into Zoom. It’s not an issue if you set it up first, but disconcerting otherwise. The camera worked fine with Teams.As with other recent ThinkPads, when you bring up a video conferencing application, the system suggests you launch Lenovo View, the firm’s software for controlling video displays. This version of Lenovo View includes the traditional controls for light, intensity, and color, though it does not offer the background blurring or auto-framing features in other current ThinkPads with more powerful processors. Similarly, the Windows Camera app includes Windows Studio Effects, but the only feature it offers is auto-framing.For audio, it has three speakers and four microphones but is designed so that only two speakers and two microphones are active at any point, depending on how you orient the screen. I was pleased with the sound quality.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The machine has two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports on the top and left side of the unit (in portrait mode or when used folded), and another USB-C on the right, where it can easily be plugged into the USB-C port on the keyboard, along with an audio jack. Those ports are on the upper half of the display, while the bottom left has the power switch, and the bottom has a volume rocker (you can also adjust the volume through the keyboard).
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One of the tradeoffs with foldable laptops is the speed of the processor. This uses a 12th Generation Intel Core i7-1260U (Alder Lake), with 2 performance cores and 8 efficient cores (12 total threads) running at 1.1 GHz and a theoretically maximum turbo of 4.7 GHz. It does offer vPro support. The unit I tested had 32GB of memory and a 1TB SSD.This is a 9-watt processor, so I didn’t expect it to perform as well as the other laptops I’ve tested recently which have 15- or 28-watt processors, and in general, it didn’t. On basic benchmarks, it was a bit faster than the Spectre Foldable, which has a slightly slower Core i7-1250U processor. On my toughest tests, it took two hours and 32 minutes to transcode a large video in Handbrake, and almost 50 minutes to run a portfolio simulation in MatLab, both faster than the Spectre but slower than most current machines. One exception is a big Excel spreadsheet, which it completed in 48 minutes—while that’s slower than most of the machines I tested last year, it’s in line with the Meteor Lake machines I tested recently. In general, the performance was comparable with standard notebooks from about three years ago, and was certainly fast enough to do all the basic things you’re likely to run on a machine like this.The X1 Fold I tested has two batteries—one rated at 48 watt-hours, and another rated at 16 watt-hours. I’m a bit confused about battery life—on PCMark 10’s Modern Office test, it lasted 9 hours and 58 minutes at 40 nits, and 9 hours and 8 minutes at 100 nits of brightness in laptop mode. (In desktop mode, it lasted 7 hours and 7 minutes at 40 nits, and 5 hours and 43 minutes at 100 nits.)As I write this, a model on Lenovo’s website with the i7-1260U, 32GB, and 1TB SSD sells for $3,899. A base model with a Core i5-1230U, 16GB, and 256GB SSD starts at $2,499 (although that does not include the keyboard and stand, which costs an additional $300.)With this price, the X1 Fold, like all PCs with foldable displays, is a niche machine. But I enjoyed having the flexibility of using it as a laptop on planes or when taking notes, and then going back and setting it up as a desktop in portrait mode. I’m looking forward to when the price premium for foldable machines goes down and these machines become more affordable.
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