I am a big fan of ultrawide monitors—I daily drive a 21:9 display myself. Understandably though, it’s a little unwieldy trying to adopt the form factor into a laptop, like the massive Acer Predator 21X that cost RM39,999. In fact laptops these days tend to go taller, with aspect ratios like 4:3 or 16:10 to get more screen real estate. Lenovo though wants to buck the trend, going back to a more classic ultrawide route with its new Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 laptop.
The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 is arguably one of the cooler looking laptops to emerge from CES 2022. Right off the bat you’re greeted with an unusually long chassis, and that’s because it comes with a 17.3-inch, 21:10 IPS display running at a 3072 x 1440p resolution. It also has a peak brightness of 400nits and runs at a refresh rate of 120Hz. Incredibly, it’s not even the only screen on the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3. It also has a secondary 8-inch display to the right of the keyboard, which has an 800 x 1280 resolution and supports a stylus. The secondary display is certainly one way to make good use of the extra space by the keyboard due to the longer main display.
Under the hood, you’re getting a more typical laptop setup, with up to 12th gen Intel Core processors, integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics, up to 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 2TB of PCIe 4.0 storage. You’ll also find a pair of 2W Harman Kardon stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos, a FHD webcam above the display as well as WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1 support. Battery wise, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 has a 70Whr battery that Lenovo rates for up to 11 hours of use. And as for I/O, it has a USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, a Thunderbolt 4 port, a 3.5mm audio jack as well as a HDMI port.
Weighing in at 2kg and at 41cm long, it’s certainly not the most portable of laptops. However, with two screens on the ready, it appears like the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 would be a solid productivity machine for content creators especially. It’s also priced fairly competitively against its other dual-screen competitors, starting at USD1,399 (~RM5,888.39). In comparison, the Asus ZenBook Duo 14 starts at RM5,499 while the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 is a whopping RM12,999 for the base model. If anything, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 would also be great for movie lovers who watch a lot of ultrawide movies.
For now, the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 will only hit shelves in the US by May 2022, and availability here is also not confirmed yet. Hilariously, Lenovo also has a custom backpack to go with it, perhaps because they know not many laptop backpacks on the market will support the long ThinkBook Plus Gen 3. In the meantime, those of you interested in the laptop can still check out its product page on the Lenovo website.
