OLED comes to Lenovo's hybrid line with the ThinkPad X1 Yoga
This CES 2016 debut is the first hybrid with a brilliant OLED screen.
- Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
The Yoga line of hybrids from Lenovo has been through many updates and variations over the past few years, from the ultra-thin Yoga Pro 3 to the hidden keyboard on the ThinkPad Yoga series. The latest, and most enviable, is a brilliant OLED display coming to a newly announced variant, the ThinkPad Yoga X1.
As part of Lenovo's growing X1 line of premium professional systems, this Yoga is slim, has high-end components and premium features not usually found in consumer-level systems. The clear highlight here is their 14-inch 2,560x1,440 OLED display. OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, displays offer amazing brightness and deep black levels. It's currently our favorite big-screen television display technology, but is restricted to a handful of expensive high-end sets. It's also rare in tablets, phones and other mobile devices. Lenovo says this is the first OLED screen in a hybrid PC.
Like other Yoga hybrids, the X1 Yoga has a 360-degree hinge that folds all the way back. It starts as a standard clamshell laptop, and you can fold the hinge back past 180 degrees to form a kiosk or table tent shape, which allows the display to be front and center without the keyboard getting in the way. Or, it can fold back a full 360 degrees into a tablet shape. In the standard Yoga line, this leaves the keyboard keys sticking out from the back of the tablet, albeit temporarily deactivated.
The ThinkPad Yoga line (including this X1 model) has an important difference. Through what Lenovo calls a "lift and lock" system," the keyboard tray rises up to go flush with the keyboard, making for a more slate-like tablet mode. This new version also includes an active stylus that is stored (and charged) within a slot built right into the chassis.
The OLED screen gives the X1 Yoga real bragging rights, but more common screen options are also available, including non-OLED 2,560x1,440 and 1,920x1,080 options. Processors go up to Intel's current-gen Core i7, with up to 1TB of solid state storage and optional LTE for mobile broadband.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga is coming in January, starting at $1,449 in the US (converting roughly to £1,020 in the UK or AU$2,055 in Australia), but we don't yet have an exact price for the OLED version.
See our complete CES 2016 coverage here.