As we lean into WFH in a few months of life, none of us are looking for the thinnest and lightest laptops out there. Warriors traveling for something lighter than a block of ash are trapped inside, and navigating the couch is now usually done on the phone, not on a thin plate of plastic and silicon in the form of wafers. But I think we’ll be out soon enough and you’ll probably want to bring it Lenovo X1 Nano over.
This ultra-thin laptop is the lightest product from Lenovo. It’s exactly 907 grams, but it’s just as capable as a laptop twice its size. This laptop is Intel Evo certified, which means that a Core i7 chip powers this laptop along with the Intel Iris Xe graphics chipset. You’ll also get built-in Wi-Fi 6 and USB-C or Thunderbolt, and this new specification should provide a one-second wake-up call and nine or more hours of “real-world” battery life, according to Intel. In reality it offers much more.
The model I tested runs 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.
G / O Media may receive a commission
However, there are some trade-offs for size. The laptop has only 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 barebones machine, which is more like a combination of tablets and keyboards without a touch screen than a full laptop. But sometimes that’s all you need. Again, you will want this if you are traveling or moving from room to room or from office to office. For real desktop performance, you’ll want to show elsewhere.
True Lenovo fans will enjoy the backlit scissors keyboard known along the ThinkPad line. These cars have always had excellent keyboards, with lots of movement and a comforting click and, except for the obvious design considerations, you will get all this here. Although it doesn’t have that much travel, the chiclet style keys are big, very easy to read and can make some solid touches. The material of the key is slightly rubberized, giving it a pleasant touch, and the springs offer an excellent return with each press of the key.
The depth of the key is enough, especially for a thin and light laptop. These are not MacBook Pro keys, to say the least: they are strong and solid, as befits a ThinkPad workhorse. The keyboard has three levels of backlighting, from dim to bright. The brightest certainly makes things visible in the dark. This photo, taken late in the afternoon in a dark room, shows the keyboard shining with a lot 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. Both input devices are very usable and should be familiar to anyone who has used ThinkPads in the past. I didn’t find any visible difference in them, except that once I started using nubbin, I stopped using the trackpad. Old habits die hard.
The system also includes two security features: a fingerprint sensor and a physical camera switch that completely locks the top camera. The laptop also offers “zero-touch login”, which wakes up the computer when you approach it and then, using Windows Hello, automatically connects you. The built-in ultra-wideband radar sensor can sense that a person is approaching the laptop, thus reducing power consumption and allowing faster access to the laptop.
The 13-inch screen on this laptop is gorgeous. It has a matte surface and offers a 2K display with 450 nits of brightness. In real terms, it’s not exactly reaching 4K levels, but the pixel density is more than enough for watching videos and getting the job done. The brightness of the screen is surprising and definitely adds clarity to the package.
One thing you might miss is a touch screen. Due to the small size, my hand was attracted to the screen most of the time, which was a strange feeling. Because it’s as thin and light as a 13-inch tablet, forget that this is a standard laptop. Obviously, expectations will vary in terms of what you want a laptop of this size to be, but it’s something to consider when comparing it to similar touchscreen models.
When it comes to performance, the latest Lenovo is respectable. The 2015 WebXPRT score, a simple desktop computing test, was 388 – higher than the standard Core i7 WebXPRTs score of 277. This improvement has a lot to do with the chipset and 16 GB of onboard memory. GeekBench spat out an acceptable 13,607.
But the battery life was a surprising 16 hours and 13 minutes in our half-brightness video playback test, with the keyboard backlight off and, even considering the reduced use of resources, is an impressive number. Just MacBook Air M1 perform better in recent memory.
Overall, this is still a thin and light laptop. Media professionals will want to look elsewhere if they plan to play video or audio, but everyone else – including coders – will find their needs met by this lightweight machine.
I like the X1 Nano. It’s a great car that reminds me of something else and a lightweight favorite, the first Dell XPS 13. If I were to travel, it would definitely be a mix between it and a MacBook Air in terms of portability and usability. Nano is one of those laptops that could be very easily lost in a stack of paper on your desk, but it would definitely work great while you travel in the WFH space or – dare we dream? – you need to work on a long flight with red eyes. As a laptop for browsing, working on the web and office applications, it is a definite winner. It simply demonstrates that Lenovo is still able to reach that sweet spot of design, use and power.
readme
- Over 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 laptop for almost everyone