As we head into WFH life for a few more months, we’re not looking for the thinnest and lightest laptops out there. The street warriors hunting for something lighter than a cinder block are trapped in it, and couch surfing is now mostly done on the phone, not a wafer-thin piece of plastic and silicon. But we’ll take to the skies soon enough, I think, and you probably will Lenovo X1 Nano along.
This ultra-thin laptop is the lightest Lenovo makes. It is exactly 1.99 pounds (907 grams) but is just as capable as a laptop twice the size. This laptop is Intel Evo certified, which means that a Core i7 chip powers this laptop, along with Intel’s Iris Xe graphics chipset. You also get Wi-Fi 6 and USB-C or Thunderbolt built-in, and this new specification would provide a second from sleep mode and nine or more hours of “real” battery life, according to Intel. In reality it offers much more.
The model I tested ran Windows 10, but you can too Ubuntu pre-installed if you are more of an open source fan. Windows ran surprisingly fast on this little guy, so you’re good anyway.
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However, there are some size tradeoffs. The laptop only has two USB-C ports on the left side of the laptop in addition to a headphone jack. If you were looking for an HDMI port or even a USB-A port, you’re out of luck. This is a barebones machine that looks more like a non-touchscreen tablet and keyboard combo than a full laptop. But sometimes that’s all you need. Again, you want this when you’re traveling or moving from room to room or office to office. For true desktop performance, you’ll want to watch elsewhere
True Lenovo fans will love the backlit scissor-lift keyboard familiar in the ThinkPad line. These machines have always had excellent keyboards with plenty of freedom of movement and a reassuring click, and aside from obvious design considerations, you get all of that here. While it doesn’t have that much travel, the chiclet-style keys are large, easy to read, and can be pressed firmly. The key material is slightly rubbery, making them a joy to touch, and the springs provide excellent return with every keystroke.
The key depth is sufficient, especially for a thin and light laptop. These aren’t MacBook Pro keys, to say the least: they’re tough 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 recording, taken in the late afternoon in a dark room, shows the keyboard with a lot of light leakage around the edges of each key.
The laptop has a full trackpad and the traditional ThinkPad TrackPoint nubbin in the center of the keyboard. Both input devices are very useful and should be familiar to anyone who has used ThinkPads in the past. I didn’t find any discernible difference in them, except that once I started using the nubbin, I stopped using the trackpad. Old habits are hard to unlearn.
The system also includes two security features: a fingerprint sensor and a physical webcam switch that completely blocks the top camera. The laptop also offers “zero-touch login”, which wakes the computer when you approach it and then logs you in automatically using Windows Hello. The built-in ultra-wideband radar sensor can sense a human approaching the laptop, reducing power consumption and making the laptop faster to access.
The 13 inch screen of this laptop is beautiful. It has a matte surface and offers a 2K screen with a brightness of 450 nits. In real terms, it doesn’t exactly hit 4K levels, but the pixel density is more than enough to watch videos and get work done. The screen brightness is surprising and certainly adds clarity to the package.
One thing you may be missing is a touchscreen. Due to its small size, my hand was drawn to the screen more often than not, which was a strange feeling. Because it is as thin and light as a 13-inch tablet, you forget that this is a standard laptop. Obviously, expectations will vary when it comes to what you want a laptop of this size to be, but it’s something to keep in mind when comparing against comparable touchscreen models.
When it comes to performance, the latest Lenovo is respectable. The WebXPRT 2015 score, a test of simple office computing, was 388 – higher than WebXPRT’s standard Core i7 score of 277. This improvement has a lot to do with the chipset and 16 GB of internal memory. GeekBench spat out an acceptable 13,607.
But battery life came in at a surprising 16 hours and 13 minutes in our video playback test at half brightness with the keyboard backlight off, and even considering the reduced resource usage, that’s an impressive number. Only the M1 MacBook Air performed 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 for everyone else – programmers included – this lightweight device will suit their needs.
I like the X1 Nano. It’s a great machine reminiscent of another thing and a slight favorite, the early Dell XPS 13. If I were traveling, it would certainly be a throw between this and a MacBook Air in terms of portability and usability. The Nano is one of those laptops that can actually get lost in a stack of paper on your desk really easily, but it would certainly work great when moving around your WFH space or – dare we dream? – what needs to be worked on. a long flight with red eyes. As a laptop for browsing, internet work and office apps, it is a clear winner. It just goes to show that Lenovo is still able to hit that sweet spot of design, usability and power.
README
- More than 16 hours of battery life
- Amazing size and power for the price
- No touchscreen but do you need one?
- Only two gates
- A great little laptop for almost everyone