Lenovo is announcing at CES 2020, how it’s going to sell the ThinkPad X1 Fold, and it’ll be available this year.
The hardware hasn’t changed too much from what we saw before, beyond the addition of a Windows Hello-compatible camera on an inside bezel. It still has a neat leather exterior that slides back and forth as the hinge unfolds, and the display is still a 13.3-inch 4:3 OLED panel. Its resolution is 2048 x 1536, the same as a 9.7-inch iPad, and it looks pretty great.
The ThinkPad X1 Fold is expected to ship sometime in mid-2020, and will start at $2,499. It’s an Intel-powered machine, and will likely run on Intel’s upcoming hybrid Lakefield CPU, though Lenovo declined to confirm this. Unsurprisingly, it will run on Microsoft’s Windows OS. But the rollout of these kinds of foldable displays also introduces an interesting software bifurcation, since they’ll have to work when they’re both creased and fully opened. According to Lenovo, the earliest versions of the foldable will run on Windows 10 Pro, with a Lenovo software skin for duality; a Windows 10X version, which is a streamlined version of Windows designed for dual-screen devices, will come later, likely in the fall.
Lenovo says it’s been working on the foldable for four years now. “In 2015 we started doing user research on the size of screens, the utility of twin displays versus a single folding display, and what is sort of the right form factor,” says Tom Butler, Lenovo’s ThinkPad marketing director. The company landed on a single, flexible, 13.3-inch OLED display with a 4 by 3 aspect ratio. The display technology comes from LG Display, which Lenovo says it codeveloped the screen with.
The X1 Fold is made up of carbon fiber, “lightweight alloys,” and a “luxurious” leather cover, all of which should make the gadget pretty sturdy (though we still don’t recommend dropping it). The cover also gives it a notebook-like aesthetic, which was probably intentional on Lenovo’s part.
In terms of specs, Lenovo is continuing to remain surprisingly tight-lipped. We know it will run on Intel processors with the chipmaker’s Hybrid Technology, but specific CPU models, storage and RAM configurations, and even the X1’s screen resolution are still up in the air.
Lenovo says it has developed “clever mode-switching software” so that the machine will adapt to different apps and use cases. This appears as an app icon in the Windows app dock. Tap on it, and you’ll see an option for a single full screen or a dual-display mode. But this is an interim solution until Microsoft rolls out its official version of a dual-screen Windows 10 later this year, and it feels like a workaround.
