Hands-on with the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Twist

After being announced earlier at CES 2023, Lenovo’s ThinkBook Plus Twist was on display at the second edition of Lenovo Tech World India. ThinkBook Plus Twist builds upon the Thinkbook Gen 2 and combines an OLED display with an E-Ink one, all in a small 13-inch laptop.

The pricing and release date for India hasn’t been announced yet because of pending certifications, but you can expect it to hit the market around August 2023 starting at INR 1.3 lakhs. It will, however, be available for sale in the US in June 2023 starting at $1,649.

OLED displays are notorious for killing battery life on laptops. The problem is further accentuated on smaller laptops which by design have smaller batteries. Lenovo’s approach of combining an OLED and E-ink display to solve the battery drain problem.

Considering the device has a 13.3-inch, 2.8K OLED screen running at 400 nits, that E-ink screen might do wonders for the 56Whr battery. Lenovo claims 21 hours of battery life but hasn’t provided any context as to what type of content or loads a user would need to run in order to hit that number, so expect the actual battery life to be a bit lower than that. Regardless, if used properly the implementation is sure to give you one of the longest battery lives on a Windows laptop.

The laptop itself is no slouch either. It can be configured with 13th Gen Intel processors paired with up to 16GB LPDDR5X RAM. Storage can go as high as 1TB of PCIe4 SSD capacity. Those aren’t weak specs by any standard and the device itself is targeted at power users who’ll most be using their device on the go and with multiple browser tabs open. Safe to say, this will easily suffice. 

That said, the main attraction or ‘twist’ is the dual-screen lid on this laptop. In addition to the aforementioned 13.3-inch 2.8K OLED screen, which has 100% DCI-P3 coverage and Dolby Vision Support, the top panel of the laptop has a 12-inch E-Ink display with a 12Hz refresh rate. E-Ink displays aren’t exactly the best when it comes to showing dynamic content, Lenovo has managed to add colours and touchscreen support to make the display an appropriate fit for a laptop. 

While the 12Hz refresh rate is slow, it’s pretty amazing by E-Ink standards. The main OLED display isn’t a high refresh rate either, only clocking out at 60Hz, but both displays do support touch and pen input. You can comfortably put a document you’re reading or writing on the E-ink display and save significantly on battery life as compared to using the main OLED display, which can then be used for anything else you need to do on a laptop. 

However, if you’re willing to pick up the Thinkbook Plus Twist as your next laptop, get ready to also dive into the dongle life. There’s no full-size port on the laptop. All you get are two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports (one on either side), a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a power button on the right side that pulls double duty as a fingerprint sensor.

And that really is a shame because just about everything else on this laptop is fairly good. The keyboard comes straight from the Thinkpad series, which means excellent key travel and overall typing experience. The 1080p webcam is pretty good and comes with a shutter and two mics and there’s support for Windows Hello via a fingerprint sensor. As is the norm with newer laptops, you get WiFi 6E which was fairly fast in our brief time with the laptop paired with Bluetooth 5.1.