Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition Review

Design and Keyboard

• Lightweight frame
• Good port selection
• Classic ThinkPad keyboard and trackpad

The ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition follows in the footsteps of other ThinkPad X1 laptops with a lightweight and portable frame. It tips the scales at 1.37kg, which is about right for a 14-inch business laptop of its size, and makes it reasonably easy to sling into a bag to take on your travels.

The brushed aluminium frame both helps keep that weight down and gives this ThinkPad a durable feel that goes some way in justifying its price tag. It adds a pleasant contrast to the traditionally black laptops that Lenovo has populated the ThinkPad line with in the past, too.

Being just 15.49mm thick hasn’t stopped Lenovo from bundling a good selection of ports with the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition in functional fashion. The left side is home to a pair of Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports, a USB-A and a nano SIM slot, while the right has a further USB-A, HDMI, headphone jack and power button.

It also comes with other classic ThinkPad fixtures and fittings, such as a light-up logo on the lid and the TrackPoint pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard. This Lenovo laptop also benefits from being a 2-in-1 machine, whose screen can fold all the way around to be used as a tablet if you so choose.

The keyboard here is typical ThinkPad, and feels very similar to other ones I’ve used extensively in the past, with a soft but tactile action that makes typing thousands of words a day an absolute breeze. There is some white backlighting underneath to make after-dark working easier, although it isn’t the brightest, alongside a fingerprint reader integrated next to the arrow keys of its 75 percent layout.

The trackpad on the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition is similar in size to that on the X1 Carbon model, offering a decent size for your fingers to navigate with. As opposed to having dedicated mouse buttons, it also falls in line with capacitive pads for quick left and right clicks.

Display and Sound

• Slick, detailed OLED screen
• Virtually perfect colours
• Speakers are just okay

Lenovo provides a semblance of choice when it comes to the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition’s screen, with both a 1920×1200 IPS panel and a higher-res OLED option available in varying configurations of the laptop.

My sample was the latter – to be specific, it’s a 14-inch 2.8K resolution (or 2880×1800) OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. As with the panel fitted to the other ThinkPad X1 I’ve tested, the one here is slick and detailed with some gorgeous definition and a smooth refresh rate.

This was backed up with my colourimeter recording perfect blacks and a high contrast ratio with 0.03 and 18010:1 measurements. Combined with the 497.4 nits of peak SDR brightness, it results in sharp and vibrant images with excellent depth and dynamic range. The 6500K colour temperature is perfect, too.

Being an OLED means we’re getting virtually perfect colours as well, with my colourimeter measuring 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 spaces. The 96% Adobe RGB result is admirable. It proves the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition is equally ideal for both basic productivity and more intense colour-sensitive tasks.

The speakers here offer solid volume and depth and are perfectly fine for more basic workloads. For anything critical, you’ll definitely want to use the headphone jack.

Performance

• Solid performance with its Core Ultra 7 258V chip
• Decent integrated graphics
• Immensely fast PCIe Gen 5 SSD

The ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition follows the typical line of modern ultrabooks in opting for an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor with its eight cores and eight threads, providing solid performance for both basic productivity and more advanced, intensive loads.

The scores it achieved in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests are generally solid, especially in single-core performance. Multi-threaded performance, with specific regard to Cinebench R23, fell a little behind expectations, with a lower score than other laptops I’ve tested with the same chip inside.

The Intel Arc 140V integrated graphics within the Core Ultra 7 258V are okay here, and compare well in the 3DMark Time Spy test against AMD’s cohort with the Radeon 880M iGPU. It is a lot stronger than the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, with its Snapdragon X Elite chip and much weaker Adreno integrated graphics.

As with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, this 2-in-1 Aura Edition model comes with an obscenely quick SSD that’s perhaps the fastest one I’ve tested in any laptop, let alone a business-centric one. The 1TB capacity option recorded respective read and write speeds of 14244.66 MB/s and 13517.56 MB/s.

Software

• Remarkably clean Windows 11 install
• Only a couple of Lenovo-specific apps
• Copilot+ PC AI smarts are present

The ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition comes with a clean install of Windows 11 with little in the way of additional software. The only Lenovo-branded software that shipped with my sample was Lenovo Commercial Vantage, which allows you to do everything from check on system utilisation to fiddling with power and battery settings. It’s a handy catch-all app.

There is a small menu that can be accessed by double-tapping the Trackpoint. This menu brings up quick options for choosing everything from the spatial audio settings of the onboard microphone to system volume and a battery charging threshold to keep the internal cell in as good condition as possible for as long as possible.

The Core Ultra 7 258V chip inside is powerful enough to meet Microsoft’s minimum requirements for this ThinkPad to be classified as a Copilot+ PC. This means you can access some of Microsoft’s special AI features that have been featured on most of the other recent ultrabook releases, such as the option for AI filters and generative image work in Paint and Photos, and the nifty Windows Studio webcam effects for auto-framing and maintaining eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 14 hours and 13 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two working days

Lenovo doesn’t make any specific claims about the longevity of this ThinkPad, although the modest 57Whr capacity cell inside did initially cast some doubt in my head as to how well this laptop would do in our battery benchmark test.

However, my fears were alleviated when I checked on how well the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition had done. In the PCMark 10 battery test with the brightness at 150 nits, it lasted for 14 hours and 13 minutes. That’s decent endurance that puts it right in the mix in its class, although the Dell Pro 14 Premium is still several hours ahead.

The small 65W charger is also quite quick to recharge that 57Whr battery, taking 34 minutes to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 95 minutes.

Should you buy it?