Lenovo ThinkPad Twist review

Ever since Windows 8 was released, home consumers have had their pick of fancy laptop-cum-tablet hybrids. Now there’s the Lenovo ThinkPad Twist, which actually harks back to the kind of convertible laptops of yesteryear – released with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. Like those devices, this is a convertible Ultrabook that’s aimed at the business professional.

A centrally located hinge underneath its 12.5in touchscreen rotates clockwise when you pull it from behind, and its 180-degree swivel lets you transform it into one of four modes. You can use it as a traditional laptop or fold the lid flat against the keyboard so you can use it as a tablet. You can also form an A shape (tent mode) so that you can use it as a propped-up tablet on your desk or bedside table, or even have the screen facing away from the keyboard so you can show its contents to your friends and colleagues.

The display’s hinge is fairly sturdy, and the screen clicks back in place when it reaches the end of its rotation, preventing you from pushing it too far. It only supports five-point touch, not the ten-point we’ve seen on the Asus Taichi and the Dell XPS 12, but multitouch gestures such as pinch-zooming were both accurate and responsive. It also has a tablet-style Home button and volume control embedded in the bezel, which makes it very easy to use Windows 8 when using it as a tablet.

Sadly, it exhibits the same problem as the Taichi and XPS 12 when used as a tablet: its size. It’s still portable, but it measures 313x236mm and weighs 1.6kg, making it just a little too big and heavy to hold comfortably in your hands. It also lacks the Full HD display of its rivals, having a resolution of just 1,366×768. Still, its brightness levels are a marked improvement on the Taichi, and its four different modes make it much more versatile than the XPS 12.

Tent mode, for instance, lets you prop up the screen if you find yourself in a tightly packed train or plane and means you don’t have to lean it against a wall or seat back. Annoyingly, the screen responded to our screen presses of the onscreen keyboard by moving away from us.

Unfortunately, Tent mode is completely ruined by the accuracy of the screen’s accelerometers, which continually rotated the display upside-down whenever we used Tent mode. We often had problems in Tablet and laptop modes, too, with the display not moving from portrait to landscape orientation and vice versa unless we shook it a bit. Lenovo says it’s working on a driver to fix this problem, but at the time of writing it wasn’t available.

Unlike the Asus Taichi, the Lenovo Twist doesn’t have a second screen, which makes it less useful when you have it facing away from you as a presentation display because you can’t see what’s on it. The display also wobbles far too much when you’re using the touchscreen in the normal laptop configuration, and this has a detrimental impact on its use. It does, however, make a great impromptu presentation display, as you can just rotate the screen to your audience to show everyone what’s on screen.

Behind the fancy convertible features is a fairly average Ultrabook. It’s possible to get the Twist with an Intel Core i7-3517U processor (the same processor that powers the Taichi and the XPS 12) and 8GB of RAM, but our review sample came with an Intel Core i5-3317U processor running at 1.7GHz and 4GB of RAM. Although it has the same CPU and RAM capacity as the Lenovo ThinkPad T430u, the Twist came out slightly worse in our multimedia benchmarks, scoring just 42 overall. The T430u scored 44. This places it at the lower end of the Ultrabook performance pool, but considering the more expensive Taichi’s overall score of 46 is only marginally better, we’d rather stick with the Core i5 Twist than pay another £500 for a marginal increase in performance.

Intel’s integrated HD Graphics 4000 GPU provides the graphics, but you’ll need to lower the settings if you want to play modern 3D games on the Twist, as it only just managed 15.7fps in our Dirt Showdown tests on High Quality settings at 720p. Games that support the touchscreen were a delight to play regardless of whether it was in Tent, Stand or Tablet mode.

The Twist is a beautiful laptop to type on, as its full-sized and evenly spaced Chiclet-style keys give plenty of bounce and tactile feedback. As with all ThinkPads, you’ll have to get used to the position of the Ctrl and Fn keys (Fn occupies the bottom left-most position), but apart from a few niggles with the responsiveness of the direction keys, we could happily type on this all day. There’s no hard edge on the wrist rest, unlike the ThinkPad T430u, and the soft-touch finish makes it very comfortable indeed.

The all-in-one touchpad also shares the same soft-touch finish, and it responded to multitouch gestures just as well as the touchscreen. The Twist also has a large touchstick, as found on most other Lenovo laptops, and it also has two regular laptop mouse buttons for use with the touchstick that are located just above the touchpad. To be honest, the touchstick feels superfluous when you’ve got such a great touchpad and a touchscreen, but it does give the user choice and flexibility.

We were pleasantly surprised by its range of I/O ports, as we normally expect Ultrabooks to have fewer ports in order to keep their size to a minimum. It has two USB3 ports, a mini-DisplayPort and a micro-HDMI port for connecting it to an external display, as well as an Ethernet port, a four-in-one card reader, and a combined headphone and microphone jack.

The Twist’s major disappointment is its poor battery life. Lenovo claims it should last around seven hours, but we only managed five hours and 13 minutes in our light-use tests. This is a huge shame, as it severely undermines its ability to be used all day while on the move, which is exactly what you want from an ultraportable laptop at this price. Its glossy display also caused a few problems with reflections, but its 180-degree screen tilt made it very easy to find a comfortable viewing angle.

Overall, the ThinkPad Twist is a good but not outstanding business Ultrabook. Its different forms are a neat variation on the Ultrabook hybrid, but they fail to mask its otherwise mediocre processing power and its short battery life. Our difficulties with the screen orientation also ruined what could’ve been a great hybrid, although we hope this problem is fixed soon. We expected better from an Ultrabook at this price.