9 years after Lenovo bought the Motorola model, the primary co-branded telephone is hitting retailer cabinets. The Lenovo ThinkPhone by Motorola is offered within the US beginning in the present day for $699, providing a set of productiveness options designed to work with ThinkPad laptops. However don’t anticipate to waltz into your wi-fi provider’s retail location and discover it on a shelf — it’s accessible first to enterprise clients after which, on April twenty eighth, turns into accessible unlocked by way of Motorola.com. That places it out of consideration for lots of people, and that’s too unhealthy — in my expertise, it’s shaping as much as be a very nice telephone.
The ThinkPhone has quite a lot of the identical stuff as a mainstream flagship telephone, though it’s priced slightly below the likes of the $799 Samsung Galaxy S23. It comes with a giant 6.6-inch 1080p OLED with as much as 144Hz refresh fee. Construct high quality is sort of sturdy with an aluminum body, Gorilla Glass on the entrance panel, and Lenovo’s signature textured aramid fiber again panel for a softer contact.
The entire gadget is IP68 rated for sturdy mud and water resistance, and it’s additionally MIL-STD-810H compliant to guard in opposition to falls and extra excessive situations. I can personally verify it should survive a fall out of your hand to the kitchen flooring, which isn’t a part of the MIL-STD-810H commonplace however is a chief use case for a slipshod particular person holding too many issues.
Along with the ThinkPad-like feel and look, there’s a pink key on the aspect of the telephone in a nod to Lenovo’s traditional keyboard nub. You’ll be able to customise it to a level: a double-press will be assigned one of many telephone’s ThinkPad integration options, whereas a single-press can act as an app shortcut.
Some apps will even allow you to launch sure options — mapping it to the “Pay” display screen of the Starbucks app may prevent quite a lot of embarrassing fumbling on the register, for instance. Not that I’d know something about that. It’s nice, and I need this function from extra telephones.
I’m nonetheless placing the ThinkPhone by its paces, however I’m impressed by what I’ve seen thus far. It feels just like the high-end telephone I’ve wished Motorola to make for the previous couple of years — one thing with nice construct high quality, Moto’s nice Android expertise, and a smart price ticket. You simply have to be in the proper enterprise to seek out it.
Images by Allison Johnson / The Verge
