The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon weighs 2.4 pounds, and we don’t remember anyone describing it as overweight. But if you crave a business laptop that is even more portable than that winning ultraportable, Lenovo has something for you. The ThinkPad X1 Nano (starts at $1,350; $1,847 as tested) replaces the Carbon’s 14-inch screen with a 13-inch panel that follows the Dell XPS 13 in adopting a slightly taller 16:10 rather than 16:9 aspect ratio. That cuts the Nano’s weight to just 1.99 pounds, making the 2.64-pound Dell look downright portly. It’s not quite the lightest notebook of its general size class you can buy (the Asus ExpertBook B9450 trims a 14-inch system to 1.91 pounds), but the ThinkPad X1 Nano is a brilliant grab-and-go productivity partner. It’s well-deserving of an Editors’ Choice award for being the best, so far, of what we might term “extreme ultraportables.”
Small But Sharp
The little Lenovo’s display resolution is an unusual 2,160 by 1,350 pixels, which fits between the XPS 13’s standard 1,920-by-1,200-pixel and optional 3,840-by-2,400-pixel screens. The $1,350 base model carries an Intel Core i5-1130G7 processor with Iris Xe integrated graphics, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB solid-state drive.
Our $1,847 test unit steps up to a quad-core, 2.1GHz (4.4GHz turbo) Core i7-1160G7 CPU and double the memory and storage. The top of the line is $2,207 with a slightly faster Core i7-1180G7, a touch screen with a carbon-fiber weave instead of matte-black lid, and a 1TB SSD. Wi-Fi 6 and Windows 10 Pro are standard across the board.
Though it’s lighter, the Nano is trivially larger than its competitors—it measures 0.66 by 11.5 by 8.2 inches, while both the Dell XPS 13 and the Razer Book 13 are 0.6 by 11.6 by 7.8 inches. With a carbon-fiber top and magnesium-alloy bottom, it has the same matte-black styling and has passed the same MIL-STD 810H durability tests as other ThinkPads. There’s almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.
The screen bezels are slim, though not quite the slimmest on the market; the top bezel makes room for a face-recognition webcam with a sliding privacy shutter. The camera and a fingerprint reader beside the touchpad give you two ways to avoid typing passwords with Windows Hello. As an Intel Evo laptop, the X1 Nano boasts the chipmaker’s latest features like an 11th Generation “Tiger Lake” CPU and near-instant wake from sleep.
The compact clamshell’s worst flaw is its scarcity of ports—like the XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Air, it has only two Thunderbolt/USB-C ports and an audio jack, all on the left edge. (There’s nothing on the right side but some cooling vents and the power button.)
The USB-C ports follow the newest Thunderbolt 4 standard and support DisplayPort monitor connections as well as system charging, but the Razer puts its rivals to shame with HDMI and USB Type-A ports and a microSD card slot, as well as two Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Another Terrific ThinkPad, Just Slightly Shrunken
The Nano’s non-touch IPS screen offers an above-average 450 nits of brightness and covers 100% of the sRGB color gamut. Colors don’t quite pop like poster paints but are rich and well saturated, with inky blacks and pristine white backgrounds. Contrast is good, and viewing angles are broad. Fine details and the edges of letters are crisp and clear.
The backlit keyboard happily lives up to ThinkPads’ reputation, with a comfortably snappy typing feel and precise tactile feedback. There’s no room for a numeric keypad but the “A” through apostrophe keys span the regulation 8 inches, so things aren’t cramped. You’ll find dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys (the first two on the top row and last two at bottom right), so you needn’t fuss with the Fn key and cursor arrows.
Speaking of the Fn key, it and Control are in each other’s place at bottom left. The supplied Commercial Vantage settings utility doesn’t let you swap them, in the way that the utility of some other Lenovo laptops (“Lenovo Vantage”) does. The F10 and F11 keys place and end video calls in Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. Cursor jockeys can choose between a smallish but smooth touchpad and the TrackPoint mini joystick embedded in the keyboard; the latter has three buttons located south of the space bar.
Commercial Vantage offers system updates, Wi-Fi security, battery and cooling adjustments, and audio and microphone optimization. Two woofers and two tweeters pump out better-than-expected sound, with Dolby Access software to select dynamic, music, movie, game, or voice presets or tinker with an equalizer. The audio isn’t exceptionally loud (though it’ll fill a small room), but it is clean and not tinny or distorted; you won’t hear hard-driving bass, but you can make out overlapping tracks.
The 720p webcam captures soft-focus but well-lit and colorful images with minimal noise or static. A Smart Assist option in Commercial Vantage uses the camera to sense your presence, putting the PC on standby when you leave and unlocking it when you return.
Testing the X1 Nano: Heavy-Hitting Lightweights
For our benchmark charts, I compared the ThinkPad X1 Nano against four other 13-inch ultraportables. The Dell XPS 13 and the Razer Book 13 have already been mentioned; the Asus ZenBook 13 ties the Apple MacBook Air for best value at $999 and is the lone contestant with the more common 16:9 screen aspect ratio. The latest MacBook Air, meanwhile, ran only a subset of our benchmarks, which were slightly handicapped by using Apple’s Rosetta emulation rather than being native software for its M1 chip. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (See more about how we test laptops.)
The Nano narrowly brought up the rear here, but it easily cleared the 4,000 PCMark 10 points that indicate outstanding productivity for Microsoft Office or Google Docs. You won’t mistake it for a high-end workstation, but we don’t know of any two-pound workstations. PCMark 8’s storage measurement is cake for today’s speedy SSDs.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.
The Lenovo finished in the middle of the pack in our processing tests. Its quad-core Core i7 won’t set any records against the likes of the Apple M1 or six- and eight-core AMD Ryzens, but it won’t keep you waiting impatiently to open browser tabs or recalculate spreadsheets, either.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
Again, the Nano more than kept up with this close-packed group. I don’t see someone choosing it to manage a photo collection (you’d probably want a larger, higher-resolution screen and an SD card slot for that), but it can certainly handle a few touch-ups.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.
The Windows ultraportables finished close together and miles behind true gaming laptops with discrete GPUs. Casual and browser-based games will be fine, but none of these machines is meant for serious gameplay.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets and reported in frames per second (fps), indicating how smooth the scene looks in motion. For lower-end systems, maintaining at least 30fps is the realistic target, while more powerful computers should ideally attain at least 60fps at the test resolution.
Another gaming simulation, another illustration that these productivity machines’ ideas of entertainment tend more toward streaming and Solitaire than fast-twitch combat.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of SteelTears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.
The MacBook Air is in a class by itself but the ThinkPad is a very honorable runner-up, with more than enough stamina to get you through a full day’s work or school plus an evening’s web surfing and video viewing.
A World-Class Traveler
The ThinkPad X1 Nano doesn’t pretend to be a desktop replacement; if you need a laptop that’ll spend a good deal of time in your office connected to external drives and monitors, you’ll want more ports and should opt for the X1 Carbon or possibly the Razer Book 13 (though the latter is a full pound heavier). But if portability is your priority, the Nano’s near-weightless design, long battery life, and first-rate screen and keyboard justify its premium price.
We’ve called the Carbon perhaps the best laptop you can buy. The Nano is a shade more specialized, but it easily joins its sibling as an Editors’ Choice award winner.
