Living with the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s
pcmag.comOne of the more interesting—and more curious—laptops I've tried in a while is the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, one of the few ARM-based Windows systems on the market. The machine is designed to provide the laptop features we expect with the advantages we expect from phones, such as better battery life and instant on. It does have some nice features, and is a definite improvement from last year's ThinkPad Flex 5G, but I'm still not convinced that Windows on ARM is ready.
The machine looks like an ultraportable ThinkPad, with a 13.3-inch display, black matte color, magnesium cover, and the familiar red pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard. Measuring 0.53 by 11.8 by 8.13 inches (HWD) and weighing just 2.5 pounds (3.16 pounds with the included 65-watt charger), it's light and easy to carry.
It doesn't offer much in the way of ports, however: the left side of the machine has two USB-C ports, but without support for Thunderbolt; and the right side has a SIM socket, a lock, and a headphone/mic jack. No USB-A, no HDMI. There's a 5MP webcam enclosed in a lip that protrudes from the top of the screen, with a key that physically covers the webcam, though no user-accessible shutter.
Like most of the current ThinkPad series, it has a decent-size touchpad with physical left and right buttons. It has a reasonable keyboard, but it seems a bit shallower than that on other recent ThinkPads I've tested.
The X13s has a fingerprint reader embedded in the power button, on the upper right-hand part of the keyboard, though this was problematic. On the other hand, Windows Hello worked quite well with facial recognition.
What makes this unit stand out is the processor, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. This is an 8-core processor running at a nominal
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