Lenovo ThinkBook 13s Review - HDR Business Laptop

Lenovo is known primarily as a manufacturer of ThinkPad notebooks - reliable and quality devices for solving professional problems. For example, they are the ones who work on board the ISS. However, ThinkPads are too expensive for most users.

Fortunately, Lenovo has come up with a budget alternative. Last year, the company launched the ThinkBook line of affordable models for work and business. One of them is ThinkBook 13s. We find out on her example whether the manufacturer managed to make a budget ThinkPad.

Table of contents

• Specifications
• Design
• Screen
• Input Devices
• Sound
• Speed
• Autonomy
• Outcome

Specifications

Design

The exterior of the laptop is as utilitarian as possible. There are no bright, eye-catching elements, everything is strictly to the point. Even the branding is discreet: matte logos are located along the edges of the case. The color scheme is appropriate: the model is only available in gray.

The body is metal. Only the rear duct grill, hinges and hinge lining are made of plastic. By the way, opening the laptop with one hand will not work, since the mechanism is rather tight. It is also inconvenient that there is no groove in the lower part in order to pick up the lid with your finger. But the hinge rotates 180 degrees - find the optimal angle display will not be difficult.

Dimensions by the standards of 13-inch models are rather big: large indents at the edges of the screen affect. However, the device fits into a small backpack and weighs 1.3 kg for easy portability.

Above the screen is Webcam with 720p resolution. Its quality does not cause delight, but the presence of a curtain will delight connoisseurs of privacy. Now there is no need to sculpt stickers on the lens - just move the slider.

There is no face recognition system here. For authorization, you can use the fingerprint sensor built into the power button. It works quickly and accurately, however the scan is not registered when the device starts up. Apparently, the laptop is not equipped with a buffer memory that would store data until the authentication process.

Port selection includes USB Type ‑ C, two USB Type ‑ A 3.1, 3.5mm audio jack, HDMI and a proprietary charging input. It's strange that the laptop doesn't support Power Delivery for Type-C charging. The situation is aggravated by the fact that the bundled adapter is very bulky and inconvenient to carry.

Screen

The ThinkBook 13s has a 13.3-inch display with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 dots. The surface of the screen is matte and reflects almost no glare, the crystal effect is not very pronounced. The display is slightly less sharp compared to its glossy counterparts, but at a pixel density of 166 ppi, the difference is small.

The margin of brightness is impressive. Together with a matte finish, it gives excellent readability on the sun. Color reproduction is close to natural, 100% coverage of sRGB is declared. The contrast level is decent by IPS standards, but at maximum brightness, highlights are visible on a black background. This is due to the imperfect assembly of the screen module.

The display also supports HDR, which is rare in laptops in this price segment. This makes the colors richer, but nothing more. Perhaps the screen is not bright enough to fully implement the technology.

Input Devices

The keyboard in the ThinkBook 13s is not bad, although it falls short of ThinkPad standards. The test sample does not have a Russian layout, but this did not prevent us from evaluating the convenience of printing.

The keys are large, the travel depth is sufficient, there is a backlight for working in the dark. You can only find fault with the small arrows ↑ and ↓, to which the PgUp and PgDown functions are assigned: it is not very convenient to scroll through documents with them.

But Lenovo saved money on the touchpad. It is covered with cheap plastic, on which your finger does not slide easily. The surface flexes when pressed, which makes the clicks fuzzy and rattling. After five minutes of work, you want to connect a mouse.

Sound

There are two speakers on the bottom of the case. They were tuned by HARMAN specialists, but the result is not impressive.

The volume margin is sufficient, but closer to the maximum, overloads and an increase in distortion are heard. There is no bass in the sound at all.

Overall, the speaker quality is average. The same applies to the sound in headphones, which is responsible for the built-in Realtek audio codec.

Speed

ThinkBook 13s is based on Intel Whiskey Lake ‑ U processors. Our unit has a Core i5-8265U, 8 GB of LPDDR3 RAM and a 256 GB solid-state drive. The base power consumption of the processor is 15W (PL1), however, the system can go into turbo mode for a short time, supplying 25W of power to the chipset (PL2).

Lenovo did not trick with the power management scheme, leaving the recommended Intel mode: instead of smooth adjustment, the laptop switches from PL1 to PL2 and vice versa, guided by the data on temperature. The fan starts to spin faster under load and makes a lot of noise, but this allows you to work at higher frequencies for longer.

In the Cinebench R20 benchmark, the laptop scored 1,300 points, which is quite good for this class of devices. For comparison: HP Elite Dragonfly with the same processor scored 1,150 points. System metrics recorded during testing were recorded by the Intel Power Gadget.

The integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620 accelerator is responsible for the graphics. It is enough for light editing of photos and videos, as well as casual games, but for something more it is not suitable. The laptop does not support external graphics cards as it does not have Thunderbolt certification.

The RAM is not soldered on the motherboard, so if necessary, its volume can be increased to 32 GB. You can also replace the Wi ‑ Fi ‑ adapter and install a faster SSD: the standard drive does not have the highest read and write speeds.

Lenovo has made a laptop with sufficient performance by the standards of the class and phenomenal upgrade possibilities. It is the latter that set the model apart from its competitors.

Autonomy

The ThinkBook 13s has a 45 Wh battery. During testing, the laptop lasted almost 11 hours when playing Full ‑ HD ‑ video - an indicator at the level MacBook Air and HP Elite Dragonfly. When using Word and parallel web surfing, the model worked for 6.5 hours. The supplied 65-watt adapter replenishes the charge in 2 hours.

Outcome

The Lenovo ThinkBook 13s isn't a budget replacement for the ThinkPad. Even if you upgrade the configuration, the model will be inferior in terms of build quality, keyboard and touchpad. Otherwise, we have a compact laptop with an excellent screen, decent performance and the ability to upgrade. For many, this will be enough to choose it as a working tool.

ThinkBook 13s cost varies depending on the configuration and is 58-70 thousand rubles.

Buy

The author thanks Lenovo for the device provided for testing. The company had no way to influence the test result.