Coming later this year is the next evolution of tablets. Windows 10X promises dual screen… er… single foldable screen… wait, both? But which do I choose? This is going to be tough. On the one hand you have the Surface Neo and on the other hand you have the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold. Ugh!
Let’s start with Lenovo first. I had a first generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon back in the day. It was my work machine. It was sleek. It was stealthy and fast and one of the first touch screen laptops I’ve ever had. Man that was a nice machine. I really wish that I could have kept that machine, or at least bought one myself. I’ve had other ThinkPads, in fact it was my go to machine for a couple decades. They made really great products, and they used to have phenomenal customer service. However, lately I’ve heard bad things about their service. But now we have a foldable one coming out.
On the other side of the table is Microsoft. Microsoft Surface computers have been really good. Granted they were tanks early on, but now they are the new hotness. I’ve had a Surface Pro, Surface Pro 3, Surface Laptop and now a Surface Laptop 3. It seems that they have nowhere to go but up. Except they have a problem with battery life expectations. They say I should get 11 hours, but really I get about 4 or 5. But now they have a new dual screen tablet coming out.
We know the players. What do we know about the devices? We don’t really know much yet. Really we just know that one is a foldable plastic screen and the other is two glass screens. On the one hand a single foldable screen would be nice to watch movies on as it opens up to a full 13.3 inch display. Plus it’s an OLED display. If you haven’t seen OLED before it’s about as good as it gets. As opposed to two screens where you have a hinge down the middle of your picture. On the other hand you have a crease down the middle of the foldable plastic. Plastic. OLED… wait a second, what’s this? The X1 Fold isn’t OLED, but a strange hybrid called pOLED? That’s strange indeed.
The press sheet for the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold says that they co-engineered it with Intel. Well I’m sure that all of the players in this new space have been working closely with Intel. They say the X1 will have Intel Core Processors with Intel Hybrid Technology. The X1 will come with Windows 10 in the middle of this year and with Windows 10X once that is finished. It’ll be interesting to see how Lenovo deals with the foldable screen on Windows 10.
According to what I’ve read, the Neo will have an Intel Lakefield processor. The description of the Lakefield processor sounds the same as what the Lenovo Press Sheet says about the Fold’s processor, it is a hybrid technology that will merge the speed/performance of today’s Core processors with the standby power savings of ARM chips (while still being an x86 processor).
The Neo will have LTE connectivity while the Fold only says it’ll have a 5G option in the future.
I’ve read that the Fold will have a price tag starting around $2500. That’s a good price since it means they really won’t skimp on the internals… or does it mean that pOLED is just that costly? I hope that the Microsoft product will cost about the same because I sincerely hope that they’ve all learned the lesson of netbooks.
So which one will I get? The foldable display of the X1 or the dual screen of the Neo? Well, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I’ll stick with Microsoft and go for the Surface Neo. I’m really interested to learn more about Windows 10X though and the dual screen goodness that will come of it. We shall see. Will this be the next Surface Pro, or the next Surface RT?
