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Lenovo ThinkBook 14 drops the display ball

Lenovo ThinkBook 14
Lenovo ThinkBook 14
Lenovo's Comet Lake-equipped ThinkBook 14 can be had for less than $800. It features enough RAM and storage space for the time being, and both can be upgraded retroactively.

The ThinkBook 14 is aimed primarily at business users looking for a portable and compact device with good battery life. The subnotebook offers all that in addition to a solid overall office performance owing to Intel’s Intel Core i5-10210U. Our particular SKU sold for around $800 at the time of writing, and was thus affordable enough to entice the occasional home user as well. After all you get a perfectly built device made mostly of aluminum. 

In our review, the ThinkBook 14 surprised us with its very fast SSD, which made for a very smooth overall experience. Intel’s Core i5-10210U offered enough performance, and the device outperformed most of its competitors with ease. Its plentiful connectivity will not require any compromises, and a total of five USB ports are fairly uncommon for a subnotebook. One of the USB-C ports even supports DisplayPort and Power Delivery, and can thus be used for charging the laptop. Battery life was fairly long, but unfortunately our review unit’s display was comparatively poor. On paper, a matte IPS panel is a great idea. In reality the display not only failed to meet our expectations but also the advertised maximum brightness and contrast ratio. The latter diverged from its advertised specs most notably. However, in good faith we are going to assume that our review unit simply featured a particularly bad display and our device is not representative for the entire series. Regardless, the display is not suitable for more than office tasks due to its poor color space coverage.

All things considered we dare say that Lenovo did a great job with the ThinkBook 14 save for the display-induced sour taste. If you don’t mind those issues you get a very quiet office device with good battery life in return.

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > Reviews > Lenovo ThinkBook 14 drops the display ball
Sebastian Bade, 2020-03- 3 (Update: 2020-03- 3)