(Credit: Kyle Cobian)
Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Nano isn't the most eye-catching executive notebook. With the traditional ThinkPad look and keyboard, the 2022 version, known as the Nano Gen 2, isn't as flashy as HP's Elite Dragonfly or Lenovo's own ThinkPad Z13. But there's a lot to be said for tradition, and despite some trade offs, the ThinkPad Nano offers very good performance in a small and light package that is extremely easy to carry.
Measuring 0.57 by 11.5 by 8.2 inches (HWD) and weighing just 2.1 pounds (2.7 pounds with the included 65-watt charger), this year's model is pretty much identical to last year's model, albeit slightly heavier. It has the familiar matte black color with a magnesium and aluminum frame and a carbon fiber hybrid lid, with a keyboard that includes the familiar red TrackPoint pointing stick and touchpad with physical buttons. In other words, it looks like a ThinkPad. And unlike the Z13, the keyboard feel will be familiar to ThinkPad users.
It has a 13-inch 2,160-by-1,350-pixel display rated at 450 nits. The 16:10 display is now standard, and this display offers a bit more resolution than many machines in this class even if the screen is a bit smaller. My test unit had a standard display although a touch-screen option is available, and I do like touch displays.
One obvious drawback of the Nano compared with some slightly larger machines is the relative lack of ports. The right side has two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports and a mic/headset jack. The left side just has a power button and some vents. There's no USB-A port, nor an HDMI port, or even a locking slot. And while two USB-C ports are sufficient, it would be more convenient if they were on each side. The Nano is far from alone in having a small number of ports, and of course, you can get dongles to connect USB-C/Thunderbolt to USB-A, HDMI, or DisplayPort, but it's not optimal.
I did use the Nano with a number of docks, including Lenovo's Thunderbolt 3 dock, and then it worked fine with external HDMI and DisplayPort monitors. As you'd expect, it supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1, and is available with an optional Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 5G modem (though my unit did not include the 5G modem).
The webcam was also somewhat disappointing, which seems to be a trend on many recent Lenovo laptops. It's a Full HD webcam, and was fine in a most situations, but not as sharp as I've seen from some competitive models, like the Elite Dragonfly. The Lenovo Commercial Vantage app lets you control brightness, contrast, and exposure, but seemed to have less control than some competing machines. One thing I did like was the physical webcam shutter.
You can use a fingerprint reader next to the trackpad, or the camera with face recognition for Windows Hello login.
The model I tested came with an Intel Core i7-1280P (Alder Lake) processor, 32GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD. The i7-1280P is one of Intel's top-end mobile processors, with six Performance Cores and eight Efficient Cores, with a total of 20 threads. This is rated at 28 watts, with a maximum frequency of 4.8GHz.
Compared with most of the other small Intel laptops I've tested, performance was in the middle of the pack, better on some tests, slightly worse on others. Generally, it seemed to do better on multi-tasking tests and a bit worse on tests that stressed single core performance, which makes sense given the additional Performance cores compared with most other Alder Lake versions. (The systems I've tested with the AMD Ryzen processor scored better on all the graphics-related tests.)
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On my toughest tests, the Nano completed a MatLab portfolio simulation in just over 33 minutes, the fastest I've seen on a small laptop. (For comparison, it took the Ryzen-based ThinkPad Z13 34.5 minutes, the X1 Carbon Gen 10 38 minutes, and the Elite Dragonfly about 40 minutes). On the other hand, it took 40 minutes to complete a big data table in Excel, roughly on par with most of the small Intel machines I've tested, not as fast as I saw with the Elite Dragonfly (36 minutes) but much faster than Lenovo's Ryzen-powered 13-inch ThinkPad Z13 (48 minutes). Extra cores do not seem to help Excel performance. Using Handbrake, converting a large video took one hour 44 minutes, compared with one hour 57 minutes for the Elite Dragonfly and one hour 31 minutes for the Z13.
Battery life was adequate, but a bit less than most of the other machines I've tested, lasting 8 hours, 43 minutes on PCMark 10's Modern Office test.
A unit with similar specs to the one I tested had a list price of $3,579, but as I write this is available on Lenovo's website for $1,682.13, with a unit with a Core i5-1240P processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD listed for $1,133.55, which seems very good for an executive laptop.
Pretty much all small laptops involve some trade offs, and in the case of the X1 Nano, it's the limited ports, the relatively small trackpad, and the adequate but not great webcam. On the other hand, you get a very small and light machine with very good performance and a familiar keyboard. Overall, I found the X1 Nano to be a great traveling companion.
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