Review: Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable

Should you get a laptop or a tablet? Both? This is the question behind the success of Microsoft's Surface Pro series. It's a laptop. It's a tablet. It's not the best at either, but it's good enough for most people.

There is, however, another type of person who assumes there will be three buttons on the top of a trackpad, a little red nub in the middle of a wonderfully tactile keyboard, and ports for every accessory. This consumer is called a Lenovo fan. What if you love Lenovos but want a Surface-style device? The answer is the hybrid Lenovo ThinkPad X12. It won't satisfy in every regard—it's still light on ports—but it comes very close.

Like the Surface Pro 7, or the Dell Latitude 7320 Detachable, the ThinkPad X12 Detachable is neither the best laptop you can buy nor the best tablet you can buy, but it is pretty good at being both of those things in a single package.

First, you should understand just how small the 12-inch X12 is relative to a traditional Lenovo. I use a Lenovo X270 most of the time, which is a 12-inch laptop, but, thanks to the X270's thick bezels, it dwarfs the X12. That said, the X12 is on the chunkier side for this class of laptop-tablet hybrids; the Surface Pro 7 is considerably thinner and more svelte.

The case uses the matte black finish typical of anything sporting Lenovo's ThinkPad logo. The flip-out kickstand is every bit as good as what you'll get with a Surface Pro and much more stable than the Dell Latitude 7320. It's comfortable to type on in your lap and didn't wobble or tip when I used the touchscreen in that position.

Other perks you'd expect from Lenovo are all present: the three-button trackpad, the red nub in the keyboard, and by far the best detachable keyboard I've tested. But it's still very much a tablet with a keyboard cover, not a true laptop keyboard of the kind that made Lenovo famous. My main complaint about the keyboard is the trackpad, which can be unresponsive at times.

The 12.3-inch display uses the 3:2 aspect ratio that's come to dominate the detachable space. It's nice to have a bit of extra vertical room for documents and web pages. The X12's display is nice, with rich colors and deep blacks in movies. The color gamut covers 100 percent of the sRGB space, and the screen is very bright—up to 400 nits—which helps cut through the glare in brightly lit rooms.

What's missing in the Thinkpad X12 is what's missing in every detachable, namely ports. There are two USB-C (Thunderbolt 4) ports on the left side of the X12, and (thankfully) a headphone jack. That's a little limiting, but it's not worse than what you'll find on just about any small, high-end laptop, detachable or otherwise. The difference is that here any dongle you attach is going to hang off the side of the screen, which is awkward.

The X12 does have a pen loop on the right side of the keyboard. It's not as nice as the tucked-away pen storage Dell offers, but Lenovo does include the pen. The stylus isn't all that responsive either (the Apple Pencil is tough to beat in that regard), but it works fine for jotting down notes.

One pleasant surprise of the ThinkPad X12? Battery life. Given how small and thin it is, I wasn't expecting much, but I found that I never needed to charge it in the course of a day's work. It managed 9 hours 18 minutes in our video playback drain test, but it performed even better than that in real-world use. It will depend on what you're doing, but with my workload of chatting with coworkers on Slack, browsing the web, and writing in a text editor, I was often able to get very close to the 10-hour mark.

The base model ThinkPad X12 starts at $1,100, which gets you an 11th-generation Intel Core i3 processor, 8 gigabytes of RAM, and a 128-gigabyte SSD. It's pricey, but thankfully the keyboard is included. The model Lenovo sent me is a step up, with an 11th-generation Core i5 processor, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and a 512-gigabyte SSD. This configuration will set you back $1,279. It's the one I'd suggest for most people. You can save a little money by going back to 8 gigabytes of RAM, which is enough for light-duty computing.

There's also a higher-end i7-based configuration, but that strikes me as overkill for this machine. This isn't a device for gaming or video editing. Like other detachables, it works best as an all-around machine—browsing the web, editing documents, video calls, watching movies on the couch, reading the news with a cup of coffee. 

This could change with Windows 11 supporting Android apps, thus (theoretically) making tablet-based gaming more appealing, but that's still too far in the future to say for sure.