Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This Is Not A Laptop…”.
So I’ve been talking a lot recently about laptops tablets, form factors, ThinkPads ipads, all the pads MacBooks. I’M really curious about what’s happening in that space, that computing space you probably caught my x1 carbon video, in which I was raving about the keyboard experience in search of the ultimate keyboard experience, but lenovo also sent over their more modern, ambitious kind of computing products, which Is this the x1 tablet gen 3 touchscreen it can fold bend it’s a tablet. It’S a laptop! It’S confused in a good way. My main question here is: can this thing do both? Can it be the best of both worlds? Can you get a little bit of ThinkPad a little bit of keyboard along with a little bit of touch, to create some sort of a solution in between a traditional laptop and something like an iPad or a surface product classic box, black red white ooh, nice little Unboxing experience you see it lifts up. Well done.
We lift out the device it’s in wow. That is thin. That’S only part of it, I’m guessing that is crazy, thin course. We have a crazy thing, keyboard deck as well. This is what I was saying that Apple should have done with the keyboard for the iPad, hard plastic with the connector, but then a real keyboard experience – and this is very similar actually to the x1 carbon laptop keyboard experience, except the travels a little bit less. This is, of course, thinner, but you still have your trackpad smooth trackpad. You have the track point because it is a think pad. After all – and you have these nice tactile keys, this is definitely a more comfortable place than the keyboard attachment for the iPad pro, which was one of the reasons I eventually got fed with that device as a daily only kind of device because of input via the Keyboard attachment, okay, so over here is gon na, be the display right right who it is so the display, but also a tablet, as you can tell, and it has a kickstand unit – that’s how it stands up right.
This is very reminiscent of the surface products. This comes down attaches, and there you go. That’S kind of what your layout looks like. You can see the aspect ratio that display a little bit taller, which a lot of people happen to like for productivity.
Also, the keyboard deck gives you the angle typing via some magnets as well. So that’s another thing that you look for now as far as angles to choose from on the display. You can work it all the way down to almost flat or you can have it all the way up for almost up right now. All of your i/o is on the screen portion of the device you can see.
We have a couple type-c connectors with the Thunderbolt logo as well. You have a full-size headphone jack. This looks like a SIM card slot over here. You have a power switch and a dedicated volume rocker as well, and I’m curious, maybe we’ll can clarify for me, but this looks like a fingerprint scanner right here.
It is it’s a fingerprint scanner and you can use that to login whether you have the keyboard attached or not. So it’s a qHD IPS display. Of course it supports multi-touch as you’d expect. Now you can get this with Intel’s eighth generation processors, either Core i5 or Core i7.
Let me quickly look at the other items in the box here, I’m going to slide this to the side. Ooh. Of course we have the pen. It does come with a pen fairly portable little 65 watt power, brick, which hooks up to this extension. I like the little red touch on the pen, then you know it’s ThinkPad got the origin story in the color scheme. Now the pen itself has a clip on it as well as two buttons. If I’m talking strictly from a hardware perspective, I’m already feeling better about this than the pixel slate it just. It feels a bit more finished a bit less flimsy.
Now the display has a fairly large bezel, it’s worth noting on the sides as well as the top. It does give you a place to grip when you’re using it in tablet mode, but of course you would always love to have more display in a smaller form factor like a lot of these devices. It’S of course, kind of top-heavy because all your components are housed in this part of the unit and nothing down here, so the the keyboard portion is very light down here when you close the whole unit up. This is what you end up with. It is a slim package compared to the regular x1. It’S maybe even thinner.
I don’t know, can you tell jack? It? Is it’s a touch thinner. The laptop model has a bigger display. It’S a 14 inch display on this unit, so obviously the keyboard deck on the laptop it’s gon na be flat. There’S no nice little angle that you can achieve it just doesn’t have that functionality, but the keys themselves. Yeah I mean they’re nicer, they’re nicer on the laptop by a touch, so one of the things that happens, you get some flex in the keyboard unit. When you have it in this bent up position, don’t know if that, bugs you a lot or a little, it kind of affects the sound as well.
I get that kind of vibe to it myself. I might just keep it down. For that reason, yes, I would keep it down. For that reason, this feels solid, no flex, slightly less travel. I guess, but man, it’s a pretty good substitute for a convertible tablet. Slash keyboard attachment style device.
This is probably the best keyboard that you can get anyhow. So this one gives you the touch input it gives you the pen, it gives you the ability to kind of peel this off and go straight into a tablet type of functionality. Of course, it’s a bit large as a tablet when it came to the iPad on day to day use. I was actually a fan of the version because it felt really comfortable as a tablet on the couch, whereas I feel like this one is more on the desk first productivity first and then this you know to kick back every so often these pen based keyboard style Inputs are really interesting to me.
I hadn’t invested a lot of time in them, but now that I’ve paid a little bit more attention to what’s going on in this space, there is something nice about having a good keyboard attached to a touch interface, where you kind of have this two-stage thing going On where sometimes you’re, just interacting with the pen going through emails or so on, and then you put the pen down and you can really get some stuff done when it comes to text input. I think that’s a nice little balance going on there. Okay, in terms of the SSD, you can get either 256 or 512 gigabytes. It’S gon na come with eight gigabytes of RAM from the factory. That’S the only option in that department. This is kind of interesting look at this. You you load up YouTube, not even logged in, like I’m, not logged into this laptop at all, and I mean you see the convivial there in trending and you start to figure some things out about how you should be spending your time, what you should be watching. The important stuff that’s out there, of course, I’m talking about eight burger gadgets put to the test.
You didn’t nobody saw it coming. I’M worried guys. Speakers are not great ya know the speakers aren’t doing it guys. I think overall, it’s it’s a little bit of the best of both worlds. I’Ve been talking a lot about keyboards because it was really the thing with the iPad that made me want to go back to a laptop. This is for sure the best keyboard attachment that I’ve used.
Of course, you still have the pen. You still have the tablet. If you need it, you have a lot of interface options here, including Thunderbolt.
You have every angle you could possibly want. You have to think pad brand name. You have a fairly large trackpad, all of a sudden you’re, giving Microsoft a run for their money with the surface products.
Now I wish it had a magnet. Can you ask for everything I mean would have been nice to have a magnet? Instead, you get this guy, you get a little pen holder. How does this work like that and then what? Where does this go? Oh, oh, wow! Okay, that’s not terrible! It’S not a magnet, but it’s not terrible. I could I could. I could live with that. Actually now that I think about it, you put the ThinkPad heritage, you put the keys in.
Oh, my goodness. We got something going on guys. .