What you need to know
- Lenovo announced at Canalys Channels Forum that the foldable Lenovo ThinkPad X1 laptop will probably ship in Q2 2020.
- If that date is met, it would be the world's first foldable laptop released to the public.
- The primary holdup preventing release is software needing to be ready.
Lenovo could be the first company to ship a foldable laptop to consumers. Lenovo's chief operating officer, Gianfrano Lanci, stated that the foldable ThinkPad X1 laptop "will start shipping probably Q2 next year." The announcement came during the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona on October 16, 2019 (via The Register). If that timeline is met, Lenovo's foldable laptop will beat the Surface Neo to market.
At the conference, Lenovo's director of global commercial comms and brand, Milanka Muecke, took the 13-inch OLED device out of her handbag, stating, "I have it right here and you can have it in your purse. It looks like a leather-bound notebook that you can carry with you all day long, but it is a full performance PC that fits in the palm of your hand."
Lanci's use of the word "probably" is important. The COO explained that "hardware is ready, but we need to still fix certain things from a software point of view, and that doesn't depend 100 percent on us." Lenovo did not expand on which software development is holding the device back. There's a good chance that it is related to Windows 10X, the version of Windows 10 that is specifically designed for foldable devices.
Our piece breaking down where Microsoft is headed with foldables, goes into details of the upcoming operating system and adds that Lenovo's foldable ThinkPad X1 will be among the first devices to ship running Windows 10X.
