Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 Review

Lenovo is known for relatively spartan, office-friendly designs, especially with its ThinkBook business laptops. But the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 ($2,309 as tested) is impossible to mistake for your average black slab: This 17.3-inch behemoth will have colleagues peering over your cubicle wall to see it, thanks to an integrated second screen, shaped like a smartphone display, to the right of the keyboard.

The first ThinkBook Plus featured an e-ink display built into the lid, while the Gen 2 model offered improved handwriting and interaction. The new generation is a real glow-up, replacing the e-ink lid with an 8-inch, pen-friendly touch screen in the palm rest that tantalizingly promises to make all your productivity dreams come true. In reality, while it's a technological showcase for Lenovo and a cool conversation starter around the office, the dual-screen approach handicaps this ThinkBook in both battery life and general ease of use. We give credit to the company for pushing new and original product ideas, but we can't give this Lenovo more than 3.5 stars.

Frankenstein Design

The Plus part of the ThinkBook Plus is its primary attention-getter: an 8-inch touch screen with a Swiss Army Knife list of functions, from serving as a second display to becoming a numeric keypad or a note-taking tablet for use with the bundled stylus. We'll dive into the details in a minute.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Putting a good-sized second display beside the keyboard makes for an extra-wide laptop chassis (0.71 by 16.2 by 9.1 inches). Lenovo compensates for the horizontal stretch by giving the primary touch screen a unique 21:10 aspect ratio with 3,072-by-1,440-pixel resolution. The Gen 3 tips the scales at 4.4 pounds, which isn't ponderous compared to other 17-inch laptops, but the widescreen design gives it a pronounced rectangular shape when closed compared to, say, the Dell XPS 17 (0.77 by 14.7 by 9.8 inches).

Lenovo boasts that the combination of 3K resolution and an ultrawide panel is an industry first, and it's impressive in its own right, delivering good color coverage and brightness in our tests. Of course, that's not the display you're curious about.

Double the Display

With 10-point multi-touch, 800-by-1,280-pixel resolution, and pen support (the supplied stylus stores in a niche in the chassis), the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3's second screen is basically a petite embedded tablet. And oh, the things this screen can do.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Some of the basic functions seem clever enough, such as activating a number pad that turns the touch screen into a nine-key cluster. There's also a note-taking app that lets you scribble, sketch, and save handwritten notes.

You can also use the 8-inch display as a second screen for anything you want to keep an eye on without giving up part of the primary display. Whether that's Slack or Microsoft Teams, your Twitter feed, or a YouTube video, you can move it to the mini screen and control it with either touch or traditional keyboard and touchpad input. You can even extend a document window down onto the second screen using what Lenovo calls a “waterfall display” function.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Of course, you can get a second screen without buying a purpose-built laptop by simply attaching a mobile monitor like the Mobile Pixels Duex Lite we reviewed last year. But Lenovo has more ambitious plans. You can mirror content between the two displays, letting you annotate documents and images with the pen even while sharing your main screen in a presentation. The auxiliary screen also has its own app launcher which you can customize with your choice of widgets and tools.

Finally, you can pair your smartphone with the laptop, mirroring the phone onto the 8-inch display to make it easier to access apps and files or read messages as they arrive. It sounds amazing, but average Android and iPhone users are left out—Lenovo only offers this trick to owners of phones from its Motorola brand.

There's no denying the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 is a fascinating take on blurring the lines between personal computing and pocketable mobile devices. Unfortunately, it starts to fall apart in practical use.

Cool Concept, Disappointing Reality

Actually using the laptop quickly changes from intriguing to frustrating. Given a whole new interface or at least a familiar interface in an unfamiliar place, it's not as intuitive as the classic keyboard and touchpad or the primary touch screen. Some of the features described above sound fantastic but are clunky in actual use.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Using the second screen for everyday content, for example, isn't as comfortable as it would be with an external monitor horizontally aligned with the main display, since the 8-inch panel isn't in your eye line in normal use. Looking down at your keyboard to watch a video is surprisingly uncomfortable and inconvenient. The Motorola phone pairing feature will only be of interest to a tiny percentage of smartphone owners.

Even multitasking with the screen is a bit much, and I suspect Lenovo knows it. In a promo video(Opens in a new window) for the laptop, the company uses the buzzword “hypertasking,” for an intrusive evolution of multitasking that encompasses everything from web browsing on one device while watching Netflix on another to participating in a phone meeting from the bathroom.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

In an ideal world, we'd be able to replicate the productivity boost of multiple screens and devices with a single laptop-like device, but I don't think that this latest ThinkBook Plus has cracked the code.

Port Selection

The ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 shuffles its port layout, putting ports on the back edge of the machine instead of along the right side where the smaller screen resides. On the laptop's left flank, you'll find an audio jack and a single USB-C 3.2 port that doubles as the AC adapter connector.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Around back are an HDMI monitor output, dual USB Type-A ports, and a USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 port with DisplayPort, power delivery, and storage-array and docking-station support. For wireless connectivity, the system has Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth.

Testing the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3: Decent Performance With a Dual-Screen Drawback

Our review unit is the base configuration, priced at $2,309 with a 12th Generation Intel Core i5-12500H processor (four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 16 threads). It's paired with 16GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics. Upscale configurations are available, including Core i7-12700H models with up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The topmost config costs $2,789.

Choosing comparison systems for our benchmark charts was a bit of a challenge, since 17-inch business laptops are scarce. We finally settled on the Dell XPS 17, our current favorite big-screen desktop replacement; a 16-inch business workstation, the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4; and two other dual-screen systems, the gaming-oriented Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 and the previous Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 2. It's not the cleanest mix of machines for performance comparisons, but the Plus Gen 3 is far from your normal laptop.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is usually workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia apps. Unfortunately, the test failed to run on the ThinkBook Plus.

Even with a Core i5 rather than Core i7 CPU, the Gen 3 did well in our productivity and CPU tests, far outperforming its predecessor and easily clearing the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate smooth sailing for everyday apps like Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. It's not a workstation-class CGI rendering or video editing machine, but it'll do those jobs in a pinch.

Graphics Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Two more tests from GFXBench 5.0, run offscreen to allow for different display resolutions, wring out OpenGL operations.

Stacked against gaming and workstation rigs with dedicated GPUs, the ThinkBook Plus and its integrated graphics were never going to prove game-worthy. Indeed, it didn't really do better than the Gen 2 model with the e-ink screen on the lid. You can forget about rendering engineering or architectural models or gaming after hours, though it offers some interesting features for photo editing and graphic design.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation. We record what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show, and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at 50% and peak settings.

Not surprisingly, a laptop with not one but two backlit displays delivers relatively short battery life. Even against systems with high-powered processors and discrete GPUs, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 fell behind by hours. Granted, this jumbo desktop replacement isn't built for mobility, so keeping it mostly plugged in won't make you much more stationary than before, but it does mean you'll have to keep the charger close at hand instead of making it through a full day of work on a charge.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The 17.3-inch widescreen display offers solid color reproduction and brightness, though as an IPS panel it lacks the sky-high contrast of OLED screens. It may not suffice for the most color-critical publishing tasks, but it looked vivid and never dim in our testing. Lenovo claims the second screen produces 350 nits of brightness, though it wasn't compatible with our test equipment; we can testify that it looked good from any angle and its anti-fingerprint coating was effective at keeping smears and smudges at bay.

Verdict: A Great Idea That Needs to Mature

Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 looks amazing and has real potential for pushing the boundaries of laptop technology, but the cool factor of a dual-display laptop doesn't quite hold up in everyday use. We've seen plenty of companies try dual-screen designs, from Apple's ill-received MacBook Pro Touch Bar to the more successful Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16, but it seems every attempt faces challenges in ergonomics, software support, and user adoption. The Gen 3 tablet's right-of-keyboard placement holds it back, and limiting smartphone support to the Motorola brand makes it essentially a non-starter.

All this means that, despite solid performance and the attractive main display, this isn't the business laptop to get. Kudos to Lenovo for continuing to try new things, but it looks like the company will need at least another crack at it.