After touting the ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 folding laptop for more than a year, Lenovo has finally released the product.
The wonderfully named Jerry Paradise, vice president of Lenovo’s commercial portfolio and product management, commented, “Pushing boundaries can take you to interesting places.” “We had hoped to get the ThinkPad #X1Fold into your hands as soon as possible when we announced it last year, but we also committed to high standards of durability and usability, which meant taking our time to get it right.”
In a blog post for Lenovo, Paradise stated, “We made’several incremental improvements’ as a result of user testing and decided to delay shipping in order to ensure we meet the strict usability and durability standards expected of a ThinkPad.”
An enhanced fabric cover and initiatives to “reinforce reliability in conjunction with the rigorous Mil Spec 810H testing that X1 Fold withstands” were the outcomes of the modifications, according to Paradise, which also addressed “some user experience concerns and improving operational consistency.”
Somewhere in there are also references to thermal updates and “modifications to improve cooling and system performance.”
As a result, the device has the same clamshell design as typical laptops, but instead of a keyboard, it is entirely screen-based. The laptop may be used like a regular laptop by using an external keyboard, but Lenovo anticipates that you will text on it and either stack the laptop into a tall portrait-oriented screen or stretch it into landscape mode, as seen below.
Lenovo hasn’t made the foldable the star of its website; that distinction belongs to the inexpensive gear that’s being offered at deep discounts for Black Friday.
However, a product website indicates there are four variants available for the gadget.
Each has a 16.3″ OLED touchscreen display with a resolution of 2560 x 2024, a refresh rate of 60 Hz, and a brightness of 600 nits. A 5MP camera and integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics are two other features that are consistent across the board. Peripheral connections are handled by one USB-C 3.2 slot and two Thunderbolt 4 connectors. In all machines, there is LPDDR5 operating at 5200MHz.
The Core i5-1230U CPU, a 12th generation Intel Alder Lake design with two performance cores and eight efficiency cores, is included in the $2,499 variant.
However, neither a Bluetooth keyboard nor a pen are included.
You can purchase those add-ons, increase RAM to 16GB and SSD to 512GB, and get a little more power by upgrading the CPU to a Core i5-1230U for an additional $900.
An additional $200 gets you a Core i7, specifically the Core i71250u.
The most costly model, which costs $3,899, comes with a one-terabyte drive, 32GB of RAM, and a Core i7-1260U with vPro support.
Similar devices have been unveiled by HP and LG after Lenovo originally hinted at them. The price of HP’s device is $4,999. The only market for LG’s Gram Fold, which retails for about $3,650, is South Korea. Priced at $3,499, the ZenBook Fold 17 from ASUS.
As a result, Lenovo does not require the highest volume of folding devices for its folding devices.
Nonetheless, the business has defended its tardy delivery of the item. “ThinkPad X1 Fold Still Defines a Category Lenovo Created” is the title of the post announcing the device’s launch. Paradise concludes by expressing her opinion that “I strongly believe that ThinkPad X1 Fold is a foldable laptop ready for businesses, supported by extensive durability testing.”
“All of the user testing helped us shape the future and look forward for new innovative form factors and taught us a lot about how people will use a Foldable PC.”
