While we still worship a few months of WFH life, none of us are looking for the thinnest and lightest laptops. The warriors looking for something lighter than a fire block sit inside, and the surfing is usually done on the phone, not on a flat plastic and silicone. But we’ll be in the air soon, I reckon, and you’ll probably have the Lenovo X1 Nano together.
This ultra-thin laptop is the lightest that Lenovo makes. It is exactly 907 grams (1.99 pounds), but is as capable as a laptop that is twice as big. This laptop is Intel Evo certified, which means that a Core i7 disk drives this laptop along with Intel’s Iris Xe graphics disk set. You also get Wi-Fi 6 and USB-C or Thunderbolt built-in, and according to Intel, this new specification is supposed to provide a secondary wake-up call and nine or more hours of “real” battery life. In fact, it offers much more.
The model I tested offered Windows 10, but you can also get it Ubuntu pre-installed if you are more of an open source fan. Windows ran surprisingly fast on this guy, so you’re fine.
G / O Media can get a commission
However, there are some trade-offs for the size. The laptop has only one USB-C port on the left side of the laptop, next to a headphone jack. If you were looking for an HDMI port or even a USB-A port, you have no luck. It is a barebones machine that is more similar to a tablet and keyboard combination without a touch screen than a full laptop. But sometimes that’s all you need. You will want it again if you are traveling or moving from room to room or office to office. For real desktop performance, you will want to check elsewhere.
True Lenovo fans will enjoy the backlight keyboard, which is backlit and well-known across the ThinkPad line. These machines have always had excellent keyboards with lots of travel and comfortable clicks, and besides obvious design considerations, you can find them all here. Although it does not have as much travel, the chiclet-style keys are large, very legible and can type a lot. The key material is slightly rubbery, which makes them pleasant to the touch, and the springs provide excellent return with every push on the test.
The key depth is sufficient, especially for a thin and light laptop. These are not the MacBook Pro keys, to say the least: they are chunky and solid, like 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 a dark room in the late afternoon, shows how the keyboard shines with lots of light leaks around the sides of each key.
The laptop has a full trackpad as well as the traditional ThinkPad TrackPoint nubbin in the center of the keyboard. Both of these input devices are very useful and should be familiar to anyone who has used ThinkPads before. I found no noticeable difference in it, except that after I started using the nubbin, I stopped using the trackpad. Old habits die hard.
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 up the computer when you approach it and then logs you in automatically with Windows Hello. The built-in ultra-wide-band radar sensor can sense a person approaching the laptop, reducing power consumption and enabling faster access to laptops.
The 13-inch screen on this laptop is beautiful. It has a matte surface and offers a 2K screen with 450 net brightness. In real terms, it does not exactly reach 4K levels, but the pixel density is more than enough to watch videos and do work. The brightness of the screen is surprising and definitely gives clarity to the package.
One thing you can miss is a touch screen. Due to the small size, my hand was more often than not drawn to the screen, which was a strange feeling. Because it’s as thin and light as a 13 – inch tablet, you’re forgetting that this thing is a standard laptop. Obviously, the expectations will differ if you want a laptop to be this size, but you need to take that into account when comparing it to similar touch screen models.
In terms of performance, the latest Lenovo has been respected. The WebXPRT 2015 score, a test of simple computer types in the office, was 388 – higher than the WebXPRT standard Core i7 score of 277. This improvement has a lot to do with the chipset and the 16 GB of memory on board. GeekBench spit out an acceptable 13,607.
But the battery life came as a surprise at 16 hours and 13 minutes in our video playback test at half brightness with the background of the keyboard turned off, and even considering the reduced use of resources, it’s an impressive number. Only the M1 MacBook Air better danger in recent memory.
In general, it 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 tiny little machine.
I like the X1 Nano. This is an amazing machine that brings to mind another thing and a light favorite, the early Dell XPS 13. If I were traveling, it would definitely be a focus between this and a MacBook Air that has portability and usability regards. The Nano is one of those laptops that can very easily be left in a stack of papers on your desk, but it will definitely work great if you move around in your WFH space or – dare we dream? – your job is to do a long red-eye flight. As a laptop for browsing, web and office applications, it is a definite winner. It just shows that Lenovo can still take the sweet spot of design, usability and power.
READ MY
- More than 16 hours of battery life
- Incredible size and power for the price
- No touch screen, but do you need one?
- Only two ports
- A great little laptop for almost everyone