Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Twist: A new 16-inch laptop with an updated OLED panel and 12-inch color E Ink touchscreen in the E-reader category
The Zenbook is a sample size and it is not a surprise that the battery life of the laptop has improved this year. I have more faith in an AMD-powered OLED laptop than I do in an Intel-powered one at this point in the cycle, so I’m all for this Swift Edge — and a groundbreaking OLED 16-incher that’s truly portable, powerful, and efficient would be a great thing to have on the market.
But Acer, today, is throwing its hat in the ring. The Swift Edge is the lightest 16-inch laptop out there with a weight of just 2.58 pounds, which is very close to the Gram 16.
There’s good news: it’s got an updated version of the chip. Specifically, the model being sold in North America includes the Ryzen 7 6800U, the same eight-core processor that powers the Zenbook S 13.
In a Best Buy store a few months ago, I was hunched over an HP Spectre x360 wondering if the laptop’s OLED screen would ruin its battery life and searching for an answer. When I found out the answer was “yes, substantially less battery,” I had to walk away.
Wouldn’t it be better if I could pick between a great screen and one that I use all day? Why not both? That’s the idea behind the ThinkBook Plus Twist, a new laptop that Lenovo’s announcing at CES 2023.
Not only does it have a 13.3-inch, 400-nit, 60Hz 2.8K OLED touchscreen that covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, you can swivel its screen around to reveal another 12-inch, color E Ink touchscreen around back — one that refreshes 12 times a second (12Hz), which definitely felt slow in a demo but isn’t bad for E Ink technology.
E Ink is a low power screen tech that keeps an image on your screen until you refresh it to show something else. They are used in the Amazon e-readers that measure theirbattery life in months instead of hours but cannot display many colors or have smooth refresh rates.
But with Lenovo’s laptop, they don’t necessarily need to — because you’ve also got that glorious OLED panel on the other side. It’s possible that Windows on E Ink for reading and writing could be the best of both worlds for a writer who sometimes needs his laptop to go a full workday and beyond, and also sometimes watches video.
Just don’t expect Kindle battery life out of a laptop like this since you’ve got the overhead of running Windows on its 13th Gen Intel processor (and up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage) rather than a simple e-reader chip. Lenovo’s estimating up to 21 hours of battery life from its 56Wh battery using the E Ink screen, and it isn’t providing context about what kind of content can run for 21 hours at a time.
I don’t want to buy a laptop with a squared off front edge because it won’t have full-size ports and there isn’t much sound to it.
This isn’t the first Lenovo laptop with an identically twisty hinge or the first to add a second E Ink screen, but I’ve always been mystified by where Lenovo chose to put those secondary screens in the past. It tried to replace the keyboard with E-ink and stuck a e-book on the lid of the laptop you couldn’t really use closed.