Lenovo ThinkBook Plus (Gen 5) Review: A Windows and Android Hybrid

Home windows 2-in-1s have been doing the tablet-laptop hybrid thing for some time now, however the pill a part of that equation at all times feels missing. Whereas iPads and Android tablets have refined the expertise for greater than a decade and have huge ecosystems of tablet-optimized apps on the prepared, Home windows stays a little bit of an unpleasant duckling.

However what in case you mixed a Home windows laptop computer with a full Android pill? That’s the thought behind the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus (Gen 5), and it’s an fascinating beast.

The closest analogue to the ThinkBook Plus (Gen 5) is Microsoft’s now-dead Surface Book line however with out the necessity to cut up shared {hardware} between the display and the bottom. As a substitute, the ThinkBook packs all of its laptop computer internals into the keyboard base and the separate pill {hardware} within the show. What you find yourself with is a laptop computer that may immediately (properly, almost immediately) change between Home windows and Android on the press of a button, or function individually whenever you detach the display.

The {hardware} is not any slouch both. My overview unit Lenovo has an Intel Core Extremely 7 155H processor, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive for storage. The pill portion of the machine features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset (the flagship Android processor from 2022), 12 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of storage. These are pretty beefy specs on each ends of the equation and assist maintain the ThinkBook Plus (Gen 5) feeling snappy with each Home windows and Android.

As you’d anticipate from a $3,500 machine, the construct high quality of this ThinkBook Plus is phenomenal, with an all-metal chassis that appears like it could actually survive being run over by a pickup truck (please don’t do this). It encompasses a 2,880 x 1,800-pixel-resolution 14-inch OLED touchscreen show that appears pretty much as good as you may get in a premium laptop computer. Mixed with a set of strong audio system tuned by Harman Kardon, you could have an excellent total media expertise.

{Photograph}: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster