How much do you want a PC with a foldable screen? Until I got my hands on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16in my answer would have been “not very much”. Now I’m a convert, but there’s one big reason why I won’t be adding one to my laptop collection anytime soon.
The ThinkPad X1 Fold is a stunning piece of engineering. Whether you’re using it as a tablet, as a secondary screen with your main desktop monitor, or in laptop mode with the detachable Bluetooth keyboard sitting on the bottom half of the screen, it works brilliantly. There are flaws, and we’ll come to them, but it’s the single most impressive piece of hardware I’ve tested in many a year.
Stunning Screen
It’s impossible to start this review anywhere but the screen. When fully unfolded it’s a 16.3in OLED touchscreen, with a wonderfully crisp 2,560 x 2,024 resolution.
The screen plays tricks with your mind. When you’re using it in landscape mode, it feels almost square. Indeed, when watching videos on Netflix or YouTube, you’ll have thick black bars above and below the video, which feels like a waste of screen space.
Turn it into landscape mode, however, and it suddenly feels rectangular, perfect for reading down long web pages or documents. It’s really hard to explain why that is, because obviously the physical dimensions of the screen don’t change depending on orientation, but it has that odd shape-shifting quality.
Whichever orientation you’re using it in, the screen looks fabulous. Deep, rich colors married with bold contrast, with support for HDR 600 content. My only complaint is the limited 60Hz refresh rate, which means pages don’t scroll as smoothly as they do on devices such as an iPad Pro.
What about that gully in the middle of the screen where it folds over? When the screen is flat it’s hard to see, but you can definitely feel it with your finger as you swipe across the display. Whether that gully will grow more visible with wear is hard to say, but the hinge mechanism is robustly designed and stiff enough to let you bend the screen at any angle when you’re using the device in laptop mode.
The Three-In-One X1 Fold
To my mind, there are three different modes in which you’re likely to use the ThinkPad X1 Fold and I’m going to cover these individually:
Tablet
The Fold makes for a luxuriously large tablet screen. Windows 11 isn’t the best tablet operating system, but the screen gives you so much space that even Windows’ relatively small icons remain finger friendly. It’s perfect for web browsing or reading through long documents, and without the keyboard attached, it’s not too heavy to hold.
It’s also amazing for watching movies on your travels. Yes, those black bars above and below the video window are an irritation, but you’ve still got a gorgeous display on which to soak up the action in a plane seat or the back of a car.
You can even use the tablet with the screen part-folded, like a hardback book. This works surprisingly well with Windows 11’s ability to snap windows on either side of the fold, although there are fairly limited applications for using the screen in such a manner. The Kindle app for Windows does somewhat awkwardly support putting a page on either side of the screen, but it wouldn’t be my chosen method of reading a book. It’s too big and cumbersome.
The Fold also comes with a stylus, but I found this disappointing. The screen has a shiny, almost rubbery texture that is too grippy for the stylus and doesn’t make jotting notes smooth. It’s certainly not a patch on the Apple Pencil/iPad combo.
Second screen
If you’re using the ThinkPad X1 Fold as your main desktop PC, it makes a tremendous secondary display.
The ability to flip the screen in either orientation provides great flexibility, and the 16.3in display is more expansive than you’ll get from the vast majority of conventional laptops which can’t be flipped into portrait orientation, of course.
Lenovo provides a stand for the screen, which is stable and doesn’t take up huge amounts of desk space. With only two Thunderbolt ports and a USB-C port on the Fold itself, you may need to invest in a docking station if you’re planning to use it regularly as a desktop PC, however.
Laptop
There are a couple of choices when it comes to using the Fold in laptop mode. You can pop the screen on the stand and get the full benefit of the 16in display, in either orientation. Or you can put the Bluetooth keyboard directly on the bottom half of the screen and use it as a compact laptop, with half of the available screen space.
That latter mode is actually my favorite way of using the Fold. It works superbly as a compact laptop, not least because you get a traditional ThinkPad keyboard with perfectly spaced keys, decent amounts of travel under each key and even that trademark red TrackPoint to accompany the surprisingly spacious touchpad at the bottom of the keyboard.
The keyboard snaps magnetically to the bottom half of the screen when you’re running in laptop mode, meaning the keyboard doesn’t slide, even under the thunderous typing of heavy-handed lumps like me.
And when you’re finished working, you can detach the keyboard, fold the screen and magnetically attach the keyboard and stand to the bottom of the device too, so everything remains in one, slightly bulky package. It’s brilliantly well thought out by Lenovo.
Processing Power
There are various configurations of the XI Fold available, with a range of processors, memory and storage on offer.
The review model I’ve been sent is one of the more powerful specs, with a 12th Generation Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage to play with. It’s snappy enough in day-to-day use, although it’s reliant on Intel Iris graphics, so graphics-intensive tasks such as video editing are probably beyond its capabilities.
It’s not a gaming system, either. Attempts to play the modestly demanding Civilization VI ended in frustrating failure at the native screen resolution. Juddery frame rates of 6-7 frames per second made the game largely unplayable. There is a Wi-Fi 6E chip inside this thing, however, so cloud gaming might be a practical option if you’re determined to enjoy yourself.
Battery Life
Windows 11 reports there are two batteries inside this device, presumably one in either half of the display. Even with these, I find it hard to back up Lenovo’s claims that this device offers “all-day battery life”.
When I benchmarked the X1 Fold, running a looping video on the full display with the screen set to 50% brightness – basically just keeping the lights on – it lasted just shy of eight hours. However, under typical usage with the Wi-Fi switched on, the screen a little brighter and multiple applications running, I found the battery life to be closer to four or five hours. That’s not terrible, but I wouldn’t be confident enough to leave the power brick behind on a day trip out of the office, for example.
Thankfully, that power brick is very compact (about half the size of the one for my MacBook Pro), so it won’t take up much space in the laptop bag.
Price
Alas, here comes the showstopper. In the U.S. there are four configurations available, but the base version doesn’t even include the keyboard, which rules it out, as far as I’m concerned. That means the cheapest model, with a Core i5 processor starts at $3,399. The model I reviewed with the Core i7 weighs in at $3,599 and there’s a more expensive model with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for $3,899.
If those prices sound punchy, spare a thought for folks in the U.K., where the model I reviewed costs £4,599 ($5,789). I asked Lenovo to explain the price difference, but no explanation was forthcoming.
Either way, the prices are undeniably punchy.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16in Verdict
Judged purely on technology alone, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is incredibly desirable. It has a wide variety of use cases and it does all of them well. Yes, it’s not the most powerful laptop on the market and battery life could definitely be better, but it’s an enormously versatile piece of kit that many people would have no problem using as their day-to-day PC.
But that price… Yes, it’s an exceptional piece of kit and manufacturing those screens won’t be cheap, but $3,400 upwards puts it at the very premium end of the laptop market, making it an extravagance that few will be able to justify. In the U.K., the prices are frankly insane.
If the price drops by a few hundred dollars, as it inevitably will at some stage, it becomes hugely tempting. As it stands, however, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is a lovable luxury.
