Motorola officially announces the ThinkPhone at CES 2023

Motorola and Lenovo have joined forces at this year’s CES, announcing the imminent arrival of the business-centric ThinkPhone. Initially teased ahead of its launch on 5 January, this is the first time an enterprise-ready Motorola handset has incorporated Lenovo’s ‘Think’ branding in its name.

This naming structure hints at a phone that sits under the same umbrella as the company’s ThinkPad laptops (designed to complement each other, in fact), and in doing so sets itself apart from its G-series of smartphones available for your everyday consumer.

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What makes it so different, then? As you might expect, a key part of its business-forward approach is to do with software, with Motorola promising at least four years of regular security patches, yearly Android updates for the next three years and “seamless deployment to end users and simple device management” which should make jobs easier for IT teams. Moto KeySafe is also present, storing sensitive data such as PINs, passwords and biometric keys on a physically isolated chipset.

As I mentioned above, there’s some integration with Windows laptops as well. These aren’t limited to Lenovo’s own ThinkPad laptops, either: a unified clipboard lets your drag and drop text and images between devices, and notifications are shared across both, too. Likewise, a feature called App Stream shares apps between your laptop and ThinkPhone, and you can even use your phone’s camera as a webcam during video calls.

The ThinkPhone also comes with Motorola’s ‘ReadyFor’, which is a feature we’ve seen before on previous Motorola Edge handsets. Just plug your phone into a monitor or television via a USB-C cable (or a Motorola docking station) and you can enable a desktop-like UI on the big screen, and even use the ThinkPhone’s display as a makeshift trackpad.

All of these connectivity features are accessed via a physical red button on the left side of the handset by pressing it twice. One push of this button can also be customised to launch any app of your choosing. The ThinkPhone is IP68 rated, with a MIL-STD 810H certification, aluminium frame and Gorilla Glass Victus screen protection.

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset powers things, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of non-expandable internal storage. It supports 68W fast charging (a charger is included in the box) and Motorola says that 15mins of charging should be enough to get you through a workday – I look forward to testing these claims when I receive a handset for review.

As for the display, the Motorola ThinkPhone has a 6.6in OLED panel with an FHD+ resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. The camera array is exactly the same setup as the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion, consisting of a 50MP main camera, a 13MP ultrawide, a depth-sensing unit and a 32MP selfie.

Pricing and availability information is still a bit thin on the ground, but we do know that Motorola plans to release the ThinkPhone at the end of January.