It’s been more than seven months since I first laid eyes on Lenovo’s foldable tablet PC prototype, and the company is now ready to launch the world’s first laptop with a folding screen. The device now has a name — the ThinkPad X1 Fold — and Lenovo walked us through the painstaking process of putting such a tricky machine together. But first, we got some time with the new folding tablet to get a taste of the experiences it can empower.
At its core, the ThinkPad X1 Fold is a 13.3-inch screen surrounded by a bezel that’s chunky for today’s tablets and laptops. But that’s understandable, given the amount of tech Lenovo had to squeeze into the device. The Fold bends inwards and the two halves of the display lay almost flat upon each other, snapping shut magnetically. This leaves a small gap between them, unless you sandwich in the “Bluetooth Mini Fold keyboard” that Lenovo designed to fit in that slot.
This keyboard is one of the accessories we hadn’t seen when Lenovo first teased the Fold, and it makes a big difference. With it, you can turn the tablet into basically a mini laptop, laying a real keyboard with physical keys on the bottom half to bang out quick emails and messages. I preferred using this as opposed to the onscreen keyboard, but because of its small size, the typing layout was different from what I’m used to on a fullsize deck.
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Author: Cherlynn Low
Source: Engadget
