As we lean for a few more months of WFH life, none of us are looking for the thinnest, lightest laptops out there. Road warriors looking for something slightly lighter than a block of ash get stuck inside, and now surfing on the couch is usually done on the phone, not on some thin plastic and silicon slab. But I think we’re going to air soon enough, I think, and you’ll probably want to take the Lenovo X1 Nano along.
This ultra-thin laptop is the lightest Lenovo makes. It’s exactly 1.99 pounds (907 grams), but it’s as capable as a laptop twice its size. This laptop is Intel Evo certified, which means a Core i7 chip powers this laptop along with Intel’s Iris Xe graphics chipset. You’ll also get built-in Wi-Fi 6 and built-in USB-C or Thunderbolt, and this new specification will offer a second wake-up call and nine or more hours of “real-world” battery life, according to Intel. It actually offers so much more.
The model I tested worked with Windows 10, but you can get it too Ubuntu preinstalled if you are more of an open source fan. Windows worked surprisingly fast on this little guy, so you’re good at it anyway.
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However, there are some trade-offs for size. The laptop only has two USB-C ports on the left side of the laptop next to a headphone jack. If you’re looking for an HDMI port or even a USB-A port, you’re out of luck. This is a barebone machine that looks more like the combination of tablets and keyboards that have no touch screen than a full laptop. But sometimes that’s all you need. Again, you’ll want it if you’re traveling or moving from one room to another or from office to office. To get real performance on your desktop, you’ll want to look at it elsewhere.
True Lenovo fans will enjoy the backlit keyboard known throughout the ThinkPad line. These machines have always had excellent keyboards, with a lot of scrolling and a comforting click, and except for obvious design considerations, here’s all of that. While it doesn’t have as many trips, the chiclet-style keys are large, very readable, and can make a hard touch. The material of the key is lightly rubber, which makes it a pleasure to touch it and the springs offer an excellent return with every keystroke.
The depth of the key is enough, especially for a thin and light laptop. They’re not keys to the MacBook Pro, at least – they’re sturdy and solid, as befits a ThinkPad workhorse. The keyboard has three levels of backlighting, from dim to bright. The brightest definitely makes things visible in the dark. This shot, taken in the late afternoon in a dark room, shows the bright keyboard with plenty of light leaking around the edges of each key.
The laptop has a full trackpad as well as the traditional ThinkPad TrackPoint nubbin in the center of the keyboard. These two input devices are very usable and should be familiar to anyone who has used ThinkPads in the past. I didn’t find any noticeable difference except that once I started using the nubbin I stopped using the trackpad. Habits are hard to take off.
The system also includes two security features: a fingerprint sensor and a physical webcam switch that completely locks the top camera. The laptop also offers “zero-touch sign-in,” which wakes up the computer when you approach it, and then, using Windows Hello, automatically logs you in. The built-in ultra-wideband radar sensor can detect that a human is approaching the laptop, thus reducing power consumption and allowing faster access to the laptop.
The 13-inch screen of this laptop is beautiful. It has a matte surface and offers a 2K screen with 450 nights of brightness. In real terms, it’s not exactly a 4K level, but the pixel density is more than enough to watch videos and get work done. The brightness of the screen is amazing and brings clarity to the package.
One thing that may be missing is a touch screen. Due to the small size, my hand was drawn to the screen more often, which was a strange feeling. Because it’s as thin and light as a 13-inch tablet, forget that this is a standard laptop. Expectations Obviously, expectations will vary in terms of what you want a laptop of this size to have, but you need to keep that in mind when comparing it to similar touch screen models.
In terms of performance, Lenovo’s latest model is respectable. The 2015 WebXPRT score, a simple office-type computational test, was 388, higher than WebXPRT’s standard Core i7 score of 277. This improvement has a lot to do with the chipset and 16GB of built-in memory. GeekBench spat out an acceptable 13,607.
But the battery life was an amazing 16 hours and 13 minutes in our mid-brightness video playback test with the keyboard backlight off and even considering the decreased resource usage , is an impressive number. Only the MacBook Air M1 they work best in recent memory.
Overall, this is still a slim, lightweight laptop. Media professionals will want to look elsewhere if they want to represent video or audio, but everyone, including encoders, will find their needs met with this little lightweight machine.
I like the X1 Nano. It’s a fantastic machine reminiscent of something else and one of the lightweight favorites, the first Dell XPS 13. If you traveled, it would certainly be a launch between this and a MacBook Air in terms of portability and usability. The Nano is one of those laptops that can actually be very easy to drop on a stack of papers on your desk, but it would certainly work wonderfully when you move around your WFH space or, do you dream we dream? a long flight of red eyes. As a laptop for browsing, web work and office applications, it is a definite winner. It just proves that Lenovo is still able to achieve this sweet spot of design, usability and power.
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- More than 16 hours of battery life
- Amazing size and power for the price
- No touch screen, but do you need one?
- Only two ports
- A great little laptop for almost everyone