Hybrid tablets try to bridge the gap between the convenience of a tablet and the capability of a laptop, and they've been becoming more popular since the arrival of touchscreen-optimised Windows 8. The Lenovo ThinkPad Twist doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it makes it turn rather well…
The Lenovo ThinkPad Twist is on sale now from £850 for the basic
Intel Core i5 model with 500GB hard drive, rising to our £1,060
test model, which features an i7 processor and 128GB SSD drive.
Design
Let's get one thing straight, the ThinkPad Twist is essentially an ultrabook, but with one cool party trick. At 1.5kg it's a fair weight for a ultrabook, but as a tablet it'll soon start to wear you down.
The design and colour scheme, with its flashes of bright red on
rubberised black plastic, with a chrome band running around the
tablet part, doesn't give the impression of an upmarket device --
it's more Fisher Price than cutting edge. Fortunately the keyboard
feels better than it looks, with nicely springy keys whose slightly
concave shape invites your fingers to caress them, and responds
with a good level of travel and responsiveness.
The bright red Trackpoint button in the middle seems a bit
superfluous, with its accompanying red-striped mouse buttons,
especially since there's a perfectly good trackpad beneath it.
Features and performance
The 12.5-inch touchdisplay sits behind protective Gorilla Glass and
delivers a resolution of 1,366x768, not the full HD shilling
perhaps, but not bad at all. Full-fat 64-bit Windows 8 looks good
and the screen feels sensitive enough to make using it a breeze.
Above it sits a
webcam that can handle 720p video -- perfectly fine for
Skyping.
So far so laptop, but the Twist does have one pretty good party
trick up its sleeve: the screen is mounted on a single hinge, which
itself is mounted on a little rotating plate. Simply spin the
display around and lay it flat and hey presto, you've got yourself
a rather heavy tablet with a
display that shifts its orientation to match whatever way you're
holding it.
You can also arrange it in "tent" mode, so it stands like an
upturned V for viewing movies -- press a button on the side and the
display will automatically reorientate to suit.
The 1.7GHz dual-core processor is backed by 8GB RAM and does a
decent enough job of the performance chores. Ours came with a 128GB
solid state drive though you can also get it with a slower 500GB
hard drive and i5 processor for a couple of hundred quid less.
In benchmarking tests it delivered a PC Mark of 4,542 and during play of Portal it regularly managed frame rates around the 180fps mark, which is okay, but not outstanding. It encoded our test 11-minute move for iTunes in two minutes and 33 seconds, which again isn't bad, but not among the best.
Conclusion
The ThinkPad Twist ditches the usual ultrabook style in
favour of robust practicality. The screen resolution may be so-so
but there are no complaints about its sensitivity and the
responsive keyboard feels great too. The twist option is a tried
and tested form factor for switching between laptop and tablet and
works perfectly fine, as well as giving the impression that it can
keep doing so for years to come.
It's not a bargain, and its weight means you're unlikely to
carry it around as a tablet for long, but if you're in the market
for a few-frills, do-everything, portable computer, it's certainly
worth a look.
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