The Breaker Times

Lenovo’s ThinkBook lineup is not just aimed at small businesses. It’s where Lenovo experiments with different form factors like dual displays. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 4, for example, incorporates an e-ink display on the swivel lid that adds a new dimension to the convertible 2-in-1 form factor. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid takes things a step further, adding a detachable Android tablet to the traditional Windows clamshell laptop.

I was excited to review this one, because I’ve often wondered how a tablet might integrate into a laptop — something that many Apple fans would love to see in an iPad/MacBook mash-up. And Lenovo largely succeeds, with a very nice Windows laptop and a competitive Android tablet. But there’s a couple of significant flaws that holds the machine back and leave me waiting for the second generation before I can fully recommend it as one of the best laptops to buy.

Specs and configurations

There’s one configuration of the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid, and it’s not cheap. In fact, it’s quite expensive at $3,518, but you’re paying for two separate machines. The Windows laptop portion includes an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chipset, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 14.0-inch 2.8K OLED display. Then, the Android tablet portion has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of UFS storage. Of course, it’s built around the excellent OLED display, which is basically “shared” with the Windows laptop.

That’s a lot of money, but consider. Many similar premium Windows laptops cost between $1,500 and $2,000, and a reasonably high-end Android tablet like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra is around $1,200. The iPad Pro 13 is more expensive than that. You’re therefore paying a premium of a few hundred dollars to have two machines integrated into one package. As we’ll see, it’s an unusual approach, but it has its charms.

Design: Windows laptop

First, let’s evaluate the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid (“ThinkBook” from here on out) as a Windows laptop. And in that respect, it’s a pretty decent effort.

To begin with, it’s well-built, with a caveat or two. It’s incredibly solid in its chassis, keyboard deck, and the display that does double-duty as an Android tablet. It’s as good as any premium laptop we’ve reviewed, including the excellent Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 9, Dell’s XPS 14, and the Apple MacBook Pro M3. These are all examples of great design and manufacturing.

My caveats are regarding the hinge and the mechanism for attaching and detaching the tablet. When I first received the laptop and started using it, I was convinced that the hinge only allowed limited motion and, worse, wouldn’t close all the way to make for a standard clamshell laptop. But that was only because the hinge was very tight when I took it out of the box, and I didn’t want to force anything.

When I looked at the reviewer’s guide, it was obvious that it was supposed to close. Once I (carefully) closed it a few times, the hinge loosened up. It remained too tight to open the lid with one hand even after repeated use, but that was nothing unusual.

The other issue is that the mechanism for attaching and detaching is a bit tricky. Taking it off isn’t a problem, but putting it back on is harder than it should be. Perhaps most disappointing is that the system struggled at times to start up. It seemed to get confused as to whether it should be running Windows or Android when the tablet portion was attached.

It seems more intuitive that it should automatically switch from Android to Windows mode, and maybe it’s supposed to. But I often had to hit the power button and tap a couple of keys to get it to wake up in Windows, or to wake up at all.

Otherwise, it felt like a nice Windows laptop. It’s thin enough at 0.63 inches combined (roughly) to be competitive with laptops like the Yoga 9i Gen 9 and MacBook Pro M3. It’s quite heavy at a total of 3.87 pounds, but it does have the guts of two devices including two sets of batteries. And aesthetically, it’s a modern-looking machine with clean lines and small top and side bezels. The bottom chin is quite large, but that’s to be expected given the overall design.

Design: Android tablet

As an Android tablet, the ThinkBook is an interesting product. I don’t review Android devices, but I use an iPad Pro 13, so I’m generally familiar with large-screen devices running mobile operating systems. As a non-reviewer, I’ll say that the Lenovo ZUI 15 skin running on Android 13 is very fluid and feels eerily similar to iPadOS.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the Android software functionality because I just haven’t used enough modern Android tablets to do the topic much justice. But outside of the usual Android phone apps that didn’t translate well to the tablet format, I like using it as an alternative to my iPad Pro.

In terms of the hardware, there’s little to complain about. As mentioned above, the build quality is excellent. The tablet portion is thin at 0.26 inches and reasonably light at 2.14 pounds. That’s almost as thin as the iPad Pro 13’s 0.20 inches, but the Apple tablet is a lot lighter at just 1.28 pounds. Some of the extra weight, I’m sure, is required by the complex hinge and connection mechanism.

Lenovo includes an interesting accessory in the form of a very robust easel that’s great for propping the tablet up on a desk. It’s not really a portable solution, though, so a case with an integrated kickstand would be more useful for a lot of people. I don’t know if Lenovo will ever release such an accessory, and the product isn’t likely to be popular enough to attract a lot of third-party options.

And, of course, the centerpiece is the 14.0-inch 2.8K OLED display. I’ll dig into the objective measurements below, but it’s a bright, colorful display with OLED’s usual inky blacks. The tablet’s a little large for using the included active pen for writing and drawing, at least without resting it on a table. But it’s awesome for watching high dynamic range (HDR) content, although the iPad Pro 13’s tandem OLED display does get a lot brighter.

The bottom line is that if you want both a very good Windows tablet and a very good Android tablet — although not necessarily the best of breed in either category — then the ThinkBook is well worth considering as a single purchase.

Windows/Android hybrid

In addition, Lenovo includes several utilities on both the Windows and Android sides that support the ThinkBook’s dual-device nature. They’re a nice value-add that enhances the benefit of having both platforms in a single machine.

In Android, the integration is limited to a Hybrid Folder utility that allows you to access a shared space for passing files between the two systems. It requires a simple pairing process.

In Windows, there’s also the same Hybrid Folder utility that allows you to access the shared space. But\ there’s also a more useful Hybrid Stream utility that opens Android in a window, giving you the ability to use both environments at once. Furthermore, the Device Companion Mode lets you use the tablet as an external device for note-taking and drawing, as well as a second display. That’s a lot like Apple’s Continuity feature with the iPad Pro and a MacBook.

Again, all of this might be of most interest to a specific niche of users, but if that’s you, then you’ll like it.

Keyboard and touchpad

The ThinkBook has Lenovo’s standard keyboard with its large, sculpted keycaps and plenty of key spacing. The switches provided a light, snappy experience during my testing, and I was up and running quickly enough. It’s as good as most laptops keyboards I’ve reviewed, with perhaps only Apple’s Magic Keyboard being better. And when used in Android, it’s the best keyboard I’ve used for Google’s mobile operating system.

The touchpad is reasonably large, although there’s room on the palm rest for a larger version. It’s mechanical, where I much prefer haptic touchpads especially at these prices, and its bottom clicks were a bit loud. It’s not my favorite.

The display is touch- and pen-enabled, and it works well. As I mentioned above, the 14-inch tablet is a little large for writing and drawing while holding it in one hand, so most people will likely lay it on a surface.

Connectivity and webcam

One limitation as a Windows laptops is the relative dearth of connectivity. There are just two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 on the laptop portion and one USB-C 3.1 port. Other than a 3.5mm audio jack and the Smart Connector for the tablet, that’s all you get. Many 14-inch laptops have a selection of legacy ports. Wireless connectivity is fine, with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 provided by a ratio in the tablet portion.

There are two webcams, a 1080p version on front with an infrared camera that supports facial recognition in both Windows and Android, as well as a 13MP rear camera.

Performance

The Wind0ws laptop is powered by a 28-watt Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, a 16-core, 22 thread chipset that’s now a generation behind. It was a very popular chipset that powered some very fast laptops, and it’s still in use as Intel’s latest Lunar Lake chipsets start rolling out. Its primary competition comes from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300, both of which have been released in the last several months.

According to our benchmarks, the ThinkBook is a reasonably quick Windows laptop for demanding productivity users. Its Intel Arc graphics limit its usefulness for gaming and creative apps, but in terms of CPU performance, it’s a fast machine.

But when compared with AMD’s and Qualcomm’s latest chipsets in similar laptops, you aren’t giving up much performance. The bigger question will be on-device AI performance, which will suffer from the Core Ultra 7 155H’s slower Neural Processing Unit (NPU).

We don’t have the same set of benchmarks for Android tablets, so I’m a bit limited in evaluating the tablet’s performance. The tablet portion is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, which is a generation behind the chipset in the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra.

The laptop didn’t do all that well in the Geekbench 6 benchmark, at 1,850 single-core and 4,740 multi-core. But, throughout my testing, I found its performance to be buttery smooth and without lags. Games ran well, too.

I’m sure that the 12GB of dedicated RAM helps keep things running well. Overall, I was pleased with the ThinkBook’s performance as a tablet and couldn’t notice much difference from the iPad Pro 13 that I use with Apple’s latest M4 chipset — even though that tablet performed much faster in Geekbench 6 at 3,705 single-core and 14,221 multi-core.

Battery life

The Windows laptop portion has 75 watt-hours of battery capacity and the Android tablet portion has  38.7 watt-hours. Both promise solid battery life in each environment, although the 14-inch 2.8K OLED display is a bit power-hungry.

In our Windows web-browsing test, the Windows laptop lasted for 9.75 hours, and it managed just 8.5 hours in our video-looping test. Usually, those results are reversed, and neither keeps up with the latest Qualcomm Windows on Arm laptops that last for more than a full day.

Again, we don’t have objective battery life tests for Android, but from my testing, it’s safe to assume around 10 hours or so of battery life. That’s competitive with other tablets like the iPad Pro 13. When you’re connected to the keyboard base, you can tap into the much larger battery and can expect multiday battery life as a rsult.

Display and audio

The hybrid solution is built around a 14.0-inch 2.8K (2880 x 1800) OLED display running at 60Hz. That’s more than sharp enough for the screen size and, subjectively, the display is bright and colorful with OLED’s usual inky blacks. It’s awesome for both Windows laptop and Android tablet use. The only complaint is the 60Hz refresh rate, as many premium displays are running at 120Hz. That includes the Surface Pro 11 and iPad Pro 13 panels.

According to my colorimeter, this is a quality display. It’s bright at 411 nits, which isn’t the brightest around (the Surface Pro 11’s comes in at 532 nits, and while we can’t test the iPad Pro 13’s tandem OLED display, that one likely comes in at over 1,000 nits with standard dynamic range content), but it’s still more than bright enough for most environments. Its colors are very wide, at 100% of sRGB, 97% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3, compared to the Surface Pro 11 at 100%, 85%, and 100%, respectively. And, those colors are incredibly accurate at a DeltaE of 0.68 (less than 1.0 is considered excellent). Finally, the contrast ratio was a spectacular 28,760:1, with perfect blacks.

For productivity users and creators, this is a great display. And media creators will love it as well, although the iPad Pro 13’s display will have the highest brightness in high dynamic range (HDR) video with upwards of 1,600 nits.

Audio is provided by four side-firing speakers, similar to the iPad Pro 13’s setup. I found the sound to be a little lacking by comparison, without the deeper bass of Apple’s tablet.

A nice idea with a one significant flaw

When I signed up to review the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid, I was looking forward to seeing how well a hybrid device could meet two very different needs. Let’s face it — what you want in a laptop isn’t exactly what you want in a tablet. And I can comfortably say that the two modes work well enough, separately and together, that you’re not compromising the experience to gain the integration.

But outside of some challenges that are likely software-related, namely getting the machine to start up when switching modes, there’s one primary flaw that software can’t address. Namely, it’s how the tablet connects to the laptop base. It’s too finicky, and I often felt like I was forcing something that might break. Given that the tablet serves as the top portion of a clamshell laptop, the more robust mechanism makes sense. But for this to feel like one fluid system, it needs to be more seamless.

There is inevitably a target market for this unique device. Someone who likes to play mobile games on their tablet while on the go, for example, or likes the idea of being able to travel with just one device. I’d love to see a second generation with improved software and hardware, but for now, this isn’t quite up to snuff.