Hands-On Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga With OLED Display, X1 Carbon And X1 Tablets At CES 2016
The new 14-inch ThinkPad X1 Carbon is now both thinner and lighter at just 2.6 pounds, with Intel Skylake on board and an NVMe PCI Express SSD offering up gobs of bandwidth. However, what could be apple of our eye, no pun intended, is the ThinkPad X1 Yoga we saw. This beauty has a 360 degree Yoga-style hinge (non-watch band type), a 2.8 pound total welterweight and rechargeable holstered stylus pen. However, the stand-out feature has to be its optional 14-inch OLED display, the first of its kind in a notebook. This is a WQHD display that has all the pop, brightness, and inky saturation of any OLED display you may have seen on a smartphone or stupidly high-end TV, but in a 14-inch notebook panel for a reasonable $200 premium, so we are told.
Let’s let the ThinkPad team show you around the family and then we’ll wrap up a few more odds and ends…
Thankfully Lenovo has seen clear to bringing back external memory card access with a microSD card slot in the rear of these ThinkPad notebook devices. It’s not a full sized slot but microSD will get you there from a mainstream digicam SD card, with an adapter.
2016 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga With OLED Display
2016 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon
And its 65 Watt AC power adapter has to be the smallest notebook brick we’ve seen in a long time. It’s tiny compared to the previous generation brick. All told, the newly refreshed ThinkPad X1 line of notebooks seems to strike a great balance of portability and premium functionality with traditional ThinkPad ruggedness and keyboards that are the usual best-of-class in commercial machines.
ThinkPad X1 Notebook AC Adapter
Moving down the stack to tablets, the 12-inch ThinkPad X1 Tablet, with its fanless Core M powered config and an NVMe PCI Express SSD, up to 16GB of DDR3 memory and 2160x1440 display, has to be one of the more potent setups we’ve seen in a tablet yet. It will be interesting to see how these devices perform in our benchmark gauntlet.
ThinkPad X1 Tablets
ThinkPad X1 Tablet Snap-On Battery Extender
We’ll have to wait until April for the X1 Yoga with OLED but a number of these devices are shipping later this month and through March. Stay tuned for more details as we get systems in for testing and review.
And stay tuned for more from the back rooms and show floor of CES 2016 in Las Vegas. We’re just getting warmed up. Viva baby.
