Hands-On With Lenovo's Most Unique CES 2023 Laptops And Tablets

Lenovo has long been a vendor that delivers a ton of garden-variety laptops and computer hardware that would nicely fit in any boardroom or cubicle in the workforce. Every now and then, Lenovo wanders off the beaten path to try something new, or at least something different than what everyone is doing. If you want an Android tablet — and you don't want a Samsung Android tablet — you're probably considering a Lenovo. If you want a Chrome tablet, Lenovo is one of the only games in town.

But this year, Lenovo is unleashing an unusually high number of really interesting products that fall outside the mainstream, seemingly all at once. That's exciting. In fact, it's so exciting I had to detour away from the launch of VW's ID.7 sedan to sit down with Lenovo and go hands-on with these fun and unique products. I only had a few minutes with each device, so full opinions will have to wait for our reviews, but these are my initial first impressions.

My hands-on time was not long enough to test one point of failure and I wasn't running final software, which leaves the door open for another pitfall. From my point of view, the biggest potential upset here is the Bluetooth keyboard. My testing with the Thinkbook X1 Fold found that the Bluetooth keyboard would occasionally lose characters or double up characters while typing which (for example) you cann imagine gott really annoying aftter a whle.

I asked Lenovo about this and whether it had worked on this particular weakness from that other device. I wasn't given a solid answer, except to point out that the ThinkPad Fold X1 was two years old, and advancements have been made. This is the kind of issue that only long-term testing will reveal, so stay tuned.

Then, of course, there's Microsoft's software. Microsoft is still not amazing when it comes to non-traditional configurations of screens, keyboards, and hybrid devices. My time with the Surface Pro 9 is encouraging. I found few hiccups in Windows on the Surface, but in just a few minutes I found a couple of minor foibles on the Yoga. Notably, when I had the keyboard magnetically attached in the top half of the frame, and I swiped a window down into the lower frame, the window appeared under the keyboard, which as you can imagine was not terribly helpful.

All the same, I can't wait to get this device on my desk for testing. This is arguably one of the most exciting laptops I have seen in years, and I can't wait to put it through its paces when it launches in April.

E ink is one of those technologies that persists very well in its niche. Devices like the Kindle, various Boox tablets, and the like all have wonderful battery life, with somewhat limited performance capabilities. But what if it could run Windows? That's the question that Lenovo answers with the ThinkBook Plus Twist. This laptop has a 2.8K OLED screen on one side with a color E ink display on the other. The obvious use-case here is that you can have the back cover of your laptop look like anything you want, and it won't cost you an extra electron in battery life. You can put up a photo of your family, or your recent trip to Hawaii. While most people adorn their laptop lids with stickers (or nothing if you're like me) this is a way to super customize your laptop cover.

Or, you can twist it around and use the E ink display as your main display. There are some use cases here that make sense. If you spend most of your day reading (or editing), this works. There are two settings on the display that allow you to choose between performance at the expense of image quality and vice versa. I have to say when set to performance, it was not bad. It certainly wasn't the normal snappy performance you'd expect from a Windows laptop, but it was useable.

Another obvious advantage here is that since this is a laptop, when it's closed, there's still a screen facing out that you can use. You can read on the E ink display or watch movies on the OLED display. That's pretty sweet, but I have to wonder if Lenovo might have wandered a bit too far off the beaten path for this one. I would imagine we'll find out in June when it launches.

Finally, Lenovo subsidiary Motorola was present at the show with a ThinkPad-inspired phone, the ThinkPhone by Motorola. This is a flagship phone in every way, with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, up to 12 GB of memory, a 5,000 mAh battery, and a 50-megapixel main shooter. There's power to spare here, which is a good thing because this is meant to be primarily a business phone. Motorola will push this phone out as a B2B offering with some regional consumer availability. Whether or not that will include the U.S. is unknown.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

One impressive demonstration came from its integration with Windows. Doug Michau, Executive Director of North America Business Development at Motorola Mobility showed off the ability copy/paste between a Windows device and the phone — that's any windows device, not just Lenovo by the way. You can also use the phone's camera to import new photos directly into Windows documents like PowerPoint slides. It's very Apple-esque and goes to show how close the Android-Windows relationship is developing, and I'm on board for that.