Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold
The future is definitely foldable, but it’s still in the future.
When we first looked at the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold at CES 2020, we definitely saw it as the direction mobile computing was going to take in the coming years, and that is still very much the case – the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold just isn’t it.
There is a lot about the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold that we like – even love – but the kind of radical innovation it accomplishes comes at a very steep cost both in terms of price as well as performance and battery life.
Design
As the world’s first foldable laptop, it’s hard to quite know how to describe the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold. With the keyboard and stylus, it’s a fully functional laptop, but that doesn’t quite capture it. Without the keyboard and stylus (which is how it’s sold here in Australia, so the full cost, if you want all the bits, is $4,179), we’d be tempted to call the display or base configuration a tablet, because that’s kind of what it is, but that really undersells the design.
This is a fully functional Windows 10 64-bit laptop, so it doesn’t run into the same compatibility issues that a Windows on ARM laptop has (the X1 Fold was able to run every single benchmark test we threw at it, for example, unlike a Windows-on-ARM system like the Lenovo Flex 5G), so we’re definitely in some uncharted waters.
The display, 13.3-inches at 2K (1536 x 2048) QXGA resolution screen with flexible plastic rather than glass, is beautiful to look at, generally speaking. When fully open, the middle “seam” is only noticeable if you look at it up close, though it is much more apparent when the screen is folded at all, with the blue background of the default Windows 10 wallpaper turning a much lighter shade of blue right down the middle. We didn’t find it particularly
As the world’s first foldable laptop, it’s hard to quite know how to describe the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold.
distracting, but it’s definitely there.
The bezels around the screen aren’t the largest we’ve seen but they’re not the smallest either. They’re also magnetised which allows the Bluetooth keyboard to “dock” with the screen, turning the X1 Fold into something very reminiscent of a netbook. The keyboard is very secure when docked, which is definitely a plus since magnetised connections can often be hit or miss.
When secured, the screen shrinks automatically to just that part of it that’s visible above the keyboard, so you still have access to the Windows 10 taskbar when the keyboard is docked.
The keyboard itself is pretty tightly spaced and limited, but that isn’t a surprise given the size it’s working with. The keys are large enough that you can still hit them without accidentally hitting it’s neighbors as well, something
netbook fans will remember with either fondness of consternation.
Thanks to Bluetooth, though, any Bluetooth-capable keyboard is useable with the X1 Fold, it just won’t be able to dock the way the Fold’s Mini Keyboard will.
The stylus has 4,096 levels of pressure for precise control and can sense the tilt of the pen for more accurate shading when doing graphics work.
Performance
Across the board, the performance on the ThinkPad X1 Fold is pretty lackluster to pretty awful, depending on what you need it to do. The Intel Core i5 Lakefield SoC is a new hybrid architecture from Intel meant to shrink the size of their chips for use in mobile devices and ultra-ultra-thin laptops.
Earlier this summer, leaked benchmarks of Lakefield showed that it fell well short of the advertised maximum clock speed of 3.0GHz and that it greatly underperformed Intel Amber Lake CPUs, despite Intel’s promise that it would exceed it by about 12%.
Unfortunately, the ThinkPad X1 Fold put up some of the lowest benchmark scores we’ve seen all year, confirming Lakefield’s surprisingly poor performance – even when compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx in the Flex 5G.
In our Geekbench 5 test, the X1 Fold scored between 590 and 620 points, with an average score of 607, in single-core performance. Meanwhile, the Flex 5G’s Snapdragon 8cx scored 83 points better, with an average of 690 points.
The difference is even more stark when you look at it’s multi-core performance. The X1 Fold manages to eek out 1,724 points, while the Flex 5G scored nearly a thousand points higher, with an average score of 2,661.
On our 3DMark benchmarks - which, to its credit, the X1 Fold was at least able to run - it probably would have been better if it couldn’t. It’s Night Raid, Firestrike, and Time Spy scores just underscore how poorly the X1 Fold can process dynamic visuals. No one is expecting this to be a gaming machine, but even the Acer Swift 3 managed to break 500 on Time Spy and scores just over 1600 on Firestrike.
Software and features
With a device this expensive, we didn’t expect to see much in the way of bloatware, and thankfully that turns out to be the case. The only preinstall of note is the Lenovo Vantage software which helps manage the screen orientation as you use the device.
Probably the most important software feature on the X1 Fold is that it is running a full-featured Windows 10, either Home or Pro (no S-Mode here). It might not necessarily run everything well, but at least it can run the full suite of x64-bit apps like Adobe Photoshop and the like.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is a remarkable and gorgeous innovation, but its very underwhelming performance and battery life makes it hard to recommend for the price.
John Loeffler