If this had been a normal year, I would have been thrilled to have had the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano as my travelling laptop. It’s an extremely light notebook—just under 2 pounds—with a very nice 13-inch display, full-size keyboard, and a number of advanced features such as presence detection. It’s the kind of machine that would have been very easy to carry anywhere, and to use on a train or plane, even when used in your lap.
Even in a pandemic, it’s been a very convenient machine to have—you can easily move it between rooms. While limited ports are a bit of an issue, that’s something I’m seeing on more and more machines these days.
The basic design is standard for a ThinkPad, with the usual matte black finish with red accents, and a keyboard with a TrackPoint pointing stick in the middle. Measuring 0.66 by 11.5 by 8.2 inches (HWD), it’s not quite the smallest 13-inch laptop I’ve seen, but it’s close, and it’s very light. It has a carbon fiber hybrid top, and a magnesium-aluminum chassis, with very little flex. It feels very solid for a machine of this weight.
With the X1 Nano, Lenovo has moved to a 13-inch display with 2,160-by-1,350 resolution in a 16:10 aspect ratio. Of course, I remember when that aspect ratio was a standard, but in recent years 16:9 replaced it; now as the bezels around the screen are able to shrink, 16:10 is coming back. This gives you a little more vertical space, and as a result, it’s better for things like webpages and word processing documents. Dell seems to have begun this trend, and it’s good to see it continuing.
The display is nice, rated at 450 nits, and supporting Dolby Vision for a better picture on streaming services that support it. I’m not sure how important that is for business users, but the screen had good color and viewing angles.
As expected, the keyboard was above average, feeling pretty standard for a ThinkPad, with good travel and a nice feel.
Something new in this model is the Dolby Atmos speaker system, with four woofers, supposedly for immersive sound when doing things like streaming movies. I tried out things like noise cancellation and a default audio optimization for voice-over-IP (VoIP) calling. I’m not sure how much of a difference these made, but overall the microphone worked well.
The 720p webcam looked very good—it has a narrow field of view, so it’s appropriate for most video calls, and the clarity and colors were better than on other enterprise laptops. Like most of the ThinkPad line, it has a “ThinkShutter” physical switch for camera privacy.
The camera module comes with an IR camera with human-presence detection, enabling the machine to lock and turn off the display when you step away from it and unlock when you sit down in front of it, using face unlock with Windows Hello. I’ve seen this on a few other high-end laptops and think it’s a very convenient feature. It worked well on the Nano, logging on very quickly. Lenovo is calling this “zero touch login” and the Nano gives you more options for controlling this than I’ve seen on other machines, via the Commercial Vantage application.
There are a number of other new security features, including a new fingerprint sensor that stores the fingerprint data within the sensor itself, isolating it from the computer’s data.
The model I used had an Intel Corei7-1160G7 (Tiger Lake-U) processor, the first commercial Tiger Lake-U system I’ve tested, along with 16GB of memory. This is a four-core, eight-thread processor with a base speed of 1.20 GHz and a turbo speed of 4.40 GHz, with Iris Xe graphics, manufactured on Intel’s 10nm SuperFin process.
In my tests, it performed well on various general benchmarks, slightly above most of the Comet Lake systems and comparable with AMD Ryzen-based machines. In my more specific tests, it did very well, running a complex MatLab portfolio simulation in under 48 minutes, compared to 63 minutes on the Comet Lake-based ThinkPad X1 Carbon 8th Generation. (The fastest time I’ve seen was under 37 minutes on the ThinkPad X1 Extreme, but that is a much larger system with a more power-hungry H-series processor.) It completed a very large Excel model in 43 minutes, compared with 54 on the X1 Carbon and 44 on the X1 Extreme. Overall I was very impressed by performance, especially considering the very thin design.
Battery life was also quite good. I got almost 12 hours on PCMark 10’s Modern Office test, though I always take those numbers with a grain of salt.
My one real complaint in the work-from-home situation is the relative paucity of ports. The X1 Nano has two USB Type-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left-hand side and an audio jack; and that’s it. This isn’t that unusual on very small laptops these days, but a more traditional USB-A port would have been nice. I used a variety of docks, including Lenovo’s ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock Gen 2 to connect a wireless keyboard and both a HDMI monitor and a DisplayPort monitor; and this worked well after some initial setup issues. (I’ll have more to say about that later).
Starting at $1,499 (the model I tested sells for almost $1,900 on the web site today), the X1 Nano is a pricey option, but so is the machine I’d consider its closest competitor: the HP Elite Dragonfly, another well-built executive notebook, albeit one that’s a bit heavier and a 2-in-1.
If you’re looking for a high-end but lightweight laptop that’s perfect for a road warrior, the X1 Nano is hard to beat. It’s well-built, has a great display and keyboard, showed impressive performance, and is incredibly light.
