The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 ($1,575.40) offers something a little different than your standard small-business laptop experience. That’s thanks to a second, power-sipping E Ink display on the exterior of the case that complements the main screen. This is not an ebook reader, but more of a way to display useful information when the laptop is closed, including the time, date, weather, and even your upcoming calendar appointments. The concept is intriguing, but the implementation isn’t baked to the point where it feels like a must-have innovation; more a cool curiosity.
Second-Generation Ink
The second-generation ThinkBook Plus is a subtle improvement over the original, which was one of the more curious products to debut at CES 2020. And even before the first generation launched, Lenovo was no stranger to experimenting with E Ink laptops, trying out the concept first with the 2-in-1 convertible Yoga Book.
Unlike the diminutive, consumer-oriented Yoga Book C930, which is more of an ereader-and-laptop hybrid, the ThinkBook Plus is a full-fledged clamshell-style business laptop that just happens to have a second E Ink screen on the back of the display lid. Weighing just 2.6 pounds and measuring 0.54 by 11.7 by 8.2 inches (HWD), the sleek machine is effortless to slip in and out of your bag. It looks the part of a notebook that means business, too, with a rock-solid, dark gray aluminum chassis.
But there’s one giant curiosity you can’t miss, especially when the laptop is closed. That’s the E Ink. This second screen measures 12 inches on the diagonal, nearly as large as the main 13.3-inch LCD panel on the inside and noticeably larger than the 10-inch E Ink panel on the first-generation ThinkBook Plus. What can you do with all this E Ink? That’s where the ThinkBook Plus experience is a bit mixed. The screen technology, which evokes an Etch A Sketch toy, is obviously suited to ebook readers, which use it to simulate the experience of turning a physical book’s pages. But readers are typically much smaller than 12 inches, so you really need to think outside the box if you’re interested in the ThinkBook Plus.
Lenovo’s built-in software offers a few suggestions. The most obvious is viewing the types of basic information mentioned above, via a widget system. You can add up to four different widgets to display by default on the E Ink home screen when it’s active: Calendar, Unread Email, Weather, and Sticky Notes. The idea is that if you bring your laptop with you to a meeting and leave it closed on your desk, you can still use the corner of your eye to keep tabs on your schedule and email without checking your phone or opening up your laptop.
Other uses available with the pre-loaded software include making the entire E Ink screen a sketchpad, for use with the included digital stylus that lives in a garage on the laptop’s right edge. You could even access the full Windows desktop experience right from the E Ink screen. I wouldn’t recommend doing so, however, as even simple tasks like loading a web page take ages to display on E Ink technology, which has extremely low refresh rates by design.
The final three suggestions that Lenovo pre-loads in the software are rather unimpressive: an ereader (get a Kindle or other actual ereader for that); a Wacom-style drawing tablet when you connect the ThinkBook Plus to an external display (get an actual Wacom tablet for that); or a monochrome canvas to brighten up the display lid with a background image of your choice (get a much prettier, colorful physical case if you just want to personalize your business laptop).
Laptop First, E Ink Platform Second
While the E Ink screen’s use cases aren’t uniformly compelling, the actual user experience isn’t bad. By default, when you close the ThinkBook Plus display lid, a pop-up will appear on the E Ink panel asking if you want to put the laptop to sleep or activate the E Ink home screen. You can set the software to remember your choice so you don’t have to select it each time.
E Ink settings, from organizing widgets to setting the background wallpaper to checking for firmware updates, can be accessed directly on the secondary display. That means no opening the lid, wading through the pre-installed Lenovo apps on the Windows side of the laptop to find the setting you need, and then closing it again.
You’ll still be using Windows most of the time, of course, since this is a laptop first and an E Ink platform second. And the everyday computing experience is above average, as we’ve come to expect from premium Lenovo models. The 13.3-inch main touch-enabled display is high-resolution, incorporating Dolby Vision, 400 nits of brightness, and TUV low blue light certification. The 2,560-by-1,600-pixel dimensions are not quite 4K, but higher than the full HD of the laptop’s first generation.
Inside, there’s a Core i7-1160G7 processor from Intel’s latest 11th generation, 16GB of dual-channel LPDDR4x RAM, and a 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD. These are admirable specs for a $1,000 ultraportable laptop, but they’re merely table stakes for a $1,500 one, so the E Ink technology obviously has an effect on the overall asking price. Still, you could easily spend more than that on an equivalently equipped Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon without E Ink, so if the secondary screen matters to you, the asking price isn’t unreasonable.
Where Have All the Ports Gone?
The ThinkBook Plus has a woefully inadequate port selection for a business laptop. There are two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports and a headphone jack on the left edge, and that’s it. To be fair, the laptop’s thin chassis leaves little room for more ports, but it’s clear that anyone with more than one peripheral and no external docking station will find the selection lacking. Wireless connections include Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth, with no 4G or 5G cellular connectivity option.
The keyboard is standard Lenovo fare, which means an all-around comfortable typing experience, albeit one that’s not quite as excellent as that offered by the superior ThinkPad keyboards. The sturdy, scalloped keys are backlit, and the only problem I noticed during testing is that the up and down arrow keys are half-height, rather than the preferred inverted-T arrangement. The buttonless, clickable touchpad tracks accurately and has a sturdy hinge.
The ThinkBook Plus power button isn’t in the keyboard, but instead located on the right edge of the laptop, where it’s easily accessible when you want to turn on or wake up the laptop to use the E Ink screen without opening the lid. There’s even a fingerprint reader built into the power button, so you can log into your account as well.
The integrated pen storage is located next to the power button; simply hook your fingernail into the indentation on top of the pen and pull it out. The stylus is passable for interacting with on-screen elements, though it lacks the wide pressure sensitivity range and tilt recognition of more premium Lenovo active styli that are better suited to digital art creation.
There’s a webcam privacy shutter that lets you physically block the 720p camera when you’re not using it. The camera offers reasonably good quality in video conferences, but there are occasional noise and artifacts even in brightly lit rooms, and the camera lacks IR sensors for Windows Hello face recognition. Audio quality from the Dolby Atmos-tuned, Harman Kardon speakers is merely average for an ultraportable laptop. Maximum volume is adequate, though not impressive, and there’s really no bass response to speak of.
Benchmarking the ThinkBook Plus
For our benchmark charts, I compared the ThinkBook Plus with a few other competing business laptops. The Lenovo ThinkBook 13x is perhaps the closest non-E Ink alternative to the ThinkBook Plus in Lenovo’s lineup, while the 14-inch Dell Latitude 7420 and the 13-inch Samsung Galaxy Book Pro are two examples of higher-end enterprise business laptops. Finally, I’ve included the Microsoft Surface Pro 8, a Windows tablet that lacks E Ink but whose portability and flexibility lends it to many of the same types of calendar-checking tasks that the ThinkBook Plus’ second display is suited to.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage.
Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
Of these tests, the ones to focus on are Geekbench and PCMark 10, which show that all of these laptops offer roughly the same excellent performance on typical business tasks. There’s more variation in the specialized CPU-intensive tests, but these aren’t representative of how most people use mainstream business laptops. It’s also interesting to see that the fourth-generation PCI Express SSD in the ThinkBook Plus helped it significantly outperform the Microsoft and Samsung devices on the PCMark 10 Storage test.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
Neither the ThinkBook Plus nor any of the competitors shown here are gaming laptops, so performance is roughly similar, clustered at the lower end of the spectrum. The noteworthy variation on the relatively forgiving Car Chase scene leaves the ThinkBook Plus coming up short compared with the rest of the field, which suggests its Iris Xe graphics processor isn’t in the performance vanguard even for casual browser-based games.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The ThinkBook Plus showed average battery life for an ultraportable laptop. It should definitely get you through a day of occasional tasks split between the E Ink and main displays. The main screen is rated for 400 nits of brightness and 100% of the sRGB gamut, and it lived up to those promises in our tests.
E Ink on a Laptop: More Cool Factor Than Must-Have
Adding an E Ink display on the back of a business laptop is a cool and potentially useful idea, but not an obvious one. Some use cases make little sense for most business customers, like employing the E Ink portion as a canvas for digital artwork. Others, such as Lenovo’s widget system, could end up being significant time and sanity savers for people who are managing lots of notifications while they’re in meetings.
Overall, however, unless you’re truly tickled by the concept, most business customers should stick with a more traditional ultraportable laptop like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon or the Dell Latitude 7420.
