Lenovo ThinkPad Twist review

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.