As we move through a few more months of WFH life, none of us are looking for the thinnest and lightest laptops out there. Road warriors in search of something a little lighter than a concrete block are trapped inside, and surfing on the couch is now usually done on the phone, not some thin plastic and silicon plate. But soon we’ll be taking off, I think, and you’ll probably want to bring the Lenovo X1 Nano over.
This ultra-thin laptop is the lightest from Lenovo. It has exactly 907 grams, but is as capable as a laptop twice its size. This laptop is certified by Intel Evo, which means that a Core i7 chip powers this laptop along with Intel’s Iris Xe graphics chipset. You’ll also have Wi-Fi 6 and USB-C or Thunderbolt built-in, and this new specification should offer a second rest and nine or more hours of “real-world” battery life, according to Intel. In reality, it offers much more.
The model I tested ran Windows 10, but you can also get Ubuntu pre-installed if you’re more of an open source fan. Windows ran surprisingly fast on this guy, so you’re good anyway.
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However, there are some disadvantages to the size. The laptop has only two USB-C ports on the left side of the laptop next to a headphone connector. 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 tablet and keyboard combination without a touchscreen than a complete laptop. But sometimes that’s all you need. Again, you will want this if you are traveling or moving from one room to another or from one office to another. For real desktop performance, you’ll want to look somewhere else.
True Lenovo fans will enjoy the scissor lift backlit keyboard, familiar across the ThinkPad line. These machines have always had excellent keyboards with lots of travel and a comforting click and, except for obvious design considerations, you get it all here. Although it does not have much movement, the chiclet style keys are large, very readable and can take some solid touches. The material of the keys is lightly rubberized, which makes them pleasant to the touch, and the springs offer excellent return with each key press.
The key depth is sufficient, especially for a thin and light laptop. These are not MacBook Pro keys, to say the least: they are robust and solid, as befits a ThinkPad workhorse. The keyboard has three levels of backlight, from dark to light. The brightest one definitely makes things visible in the dark. This photo, taken in the late afternoon in a dark room, shows the keyboard glowing with a lot of light leakage 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 useful and should be familiar to anyone who has used ThinkPads in the past. I didn’t find any noticeable difference in them, except that when I started using the nubbin, I stopped using the trackpad. Old habits are hard to die.
The system also includes two security features: a fingerprint sensor and a physical webcam switch that completely blocks the upper camera. The laptop also offers “touchless login”, which activates the computer when you approach it and then, using Windows Hello, automatically connects you. The integrated ultra-wideband radar sensor can detect a human approaching the laptop, thereby 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 nits of brightness. In real terms, it’s not exactly reaching 4K levels, but the pixel density is more than enough to watch videos and get the job done. The brightness of the screen is surprising and definitely adds clarity to the package.
One thing you can miss is a touchscreen. Because of 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, you forget that it’s a standard laptop. Obviously, expectations vary when it comes to what you want a laptop this size to be, but it is something to consider when comparing it with similar models of touch screens.
When it comes to performance, the latest Lenovo is respectable. The score for WebXPRT 2015, a simple office computing test, 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 on-board memory. GeekBench spat out an acceptable 13,607.
But battery life reached an astonishing 16 hours and 13 minutes in our half-brightness video playback test with the keyboard backlight turned off, and even taking into account the diminished use of resources, this is an impressive number. Only 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 are planning to render video or audio, but everyone else – including encoders – will find their needs satisfied by this small, lightweight machine.
I like the X1 Nano. It’s a great machine that brings to mind another favorite thing from the light, the Dell XPS 13. If I were traveling, it would definitely be a dispute between it and a MacBook Air in terms of portability and usability. The Nano is one of those laptops that could be very easy to drop onto a stack of papers on your desk, but it would definitely work wonderfully as you move around in your WFH space or – dare we dream? – it would take some work a long night flight. As a laptop for browsing, working on the web and office applications, it is a definite winner. It just shows that Lenovo is still capable of reaching that sweet spot for design, usability and power.
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- Over 16 hours of battery life
- Incredible size and power for the price
- No touchscreen, but do you need one?
- Only two ports
- A great little laptop for almost everyone