I spent 15 minutes hunched over an HP Spectre x360 in a drafty Best Buy store trying to figure out if the screen on the laptop would ruin its battery life. I walked away when I was told that the answer was substantially less battery.
I don't understand why I have to choose between a good screen and a bad one. Shouldn't both be? The ThinkBook Plus Twist is a new laptop that will be announced at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Not only does it have a 13.3-inch, 400nit, 60Hz 2.8K OLED screen that covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, you can also see another 12-inch, color E Ink screen around back.
E Ink is a low-power screen tech that displays an image until you refresh the screen to show something else. They are used in e-readers that measure their battery life in months instead of hours, but can't display many colors or have smooth refresh rates.
They don't necessarily need to with the laptop, because you also have that wonderful panel on the other side. As a writer who sometimes needs my laptop to go a full workday and beyond but also sometimes watches video, this could be the best of both worlds: Windows on E Ink for reading and writing.
The overhead of running Windows on the 13th Gen Intel processor makes it unlikely that the laptop will last long on the battery. It isn't giving context about what kind of content can run for 21 hours at a time, and it is estimating up to 21 hours of battery life from its 56Wh battery.
I hesitate to buy a laptop with a squared-off front edge because it doesn't have any full-size ports, and it lacks a 3.5mm audio jack.
It isn't the first laptop with an identically twisty hinge or the first to add a second E Ink screen, but I've always been perplexed by where they put those screens in the past. It tried to replace the keyboard with E-ink and then stuck an e-reader on the lid of the laptop that you could only use closed.
It feels like it's finally in the right place, even if it isn't my dream laptop
The starting price of the ThinkBook Plus Twist is $1,649.
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