The test: Motorola’s Thinkphone – more branding than real interest

Motorola is one of the world’s oldest living mobile phone brands, and although the company is now owned by China’s Lenovo, much of the business is still done in the US. Prior to this, Lenovo bought computers manufactured by IBM, and then acquired, among other things, the Thinkpad brand in its portfolio. Perhaps it says something about Lenovo’s ingenuity that the move to Chinese ownership leaves little trace. You can still identify a Motorola phone or Thinkpad by its design, either on the outside or graphically in the system.

On the other hand, if you want to claim that the phone belongs to the previous IBM Thinkpad family, it becomes much more difficult. On the surface, it’s a smart move, a stronger Motorola-focused brand. The question is, what more can you add than just a surface?

harsh

It’s been a while since I’ve had a Thinkpad laptop, but aesthetically I think I recognize myself anyway. The back is decorated with a Thinkpad-like logo, and it’s made of aramid fiber, i.e. really strong and durable plastic. In addition to being water resistant, the phone has been certified to withstand drops from a height of 1.25 metres. Aramid plastic doesn’t make a phone cheap, and if anything, Motorola should introduce it to all of their phones.

Of course, the Thinkphone does not have the small red joystick that distinguishes Thinkpad computers, but the phone received an additional button of the same color. We’ll come back to that.

When you turn the phone on, it feels more Motorola than an IBM PC. It’s only positive, Motorola’s system version is quick and bland, with a few useful extras that are tipped right in the Moto app along with other system tips. Motorola can only think of 5 things to say about what’s new in Android 13, one of which is that the music player got a wavy line instead of a flat one, hardly their fault.

Motorola makes phones with excellent, fast screens, including the Thinkphone. The maximum refresh rate is 144Hz, but with automatic rate for better battery life, it stops at 120Hz. The screen always feels really quick to respond.

The 5,000mAh battery is pretty standard, and the 13.5 hours of screen time at maximum brightness I get is slightly above average. It comes with a 68W charger, which despite its power is very flexible. You can also use the same charger for your Thinkpad if you have one. It also works with my three-year-old Lenovo Yoga, and the charger is a lot smoother than the one that came with the computer.

However, it is not charging the phone as fast as I would expect. From 0 to 30 percent in 8 minutes is fast, of course, but it takes more than an hour to fully charge the phone, which I have never experienced before for cell phones with such high charging power. In comparison, the Xiaomi 13 with a 67W charger fully charged in 43 minutes when I tested it.

good speakers

In-display fingerprint reader. I find it quick to respond and easy to access. Mention can also be made of the stereo speakers, which I think have a really good sound, but I usually like that with Motorola cell phones.

The Thinkphone isn’t powered by this year’s flagship chipset, but last year’s Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 is, and I’m having a hard time seeing anything wrong with that. It’s not as fast as this year’s best new models, but it’s faster than anything else and the difference isn’t noticeable in practical use.

If there’s one thing that seems to be a non-priority on the Thinkphone over your usual higher-end model, it’s the cameras. On the back, there is a 50MP main camera, a 13MP wide-angle camera, and a 2MP depth sensor. So the optical zoom is missing. The main camera is nothing to give a wow experience, but in any case it takes more than acceptable photos, even in low light. The image result is almost on par with the Samsung Galaxy S22 I’m comparing it to, both in daylight and when shooting in the dark. If I zoom in on the images to the maximum I can find they are a bit sharp, but there is nothing wrong with reproducing detail. A perfectly fine main camera, as I said, but without the extra bit you’d associate with a top-of-the-line model, which is further enhanced by the lack of optical zoom. Digital zoom also doesn’t use more pixels in the sensor, but it’s a precision digital zoom, no better than if you zoomed in on a computer afterwards.

red button

If we want to find something that distinguishes the phone from the design, it is in the red button. Standby mode is activated. Alternatively, a single press activates the Motorola tips app, double press Ready For, I think the button is a bit sluggish, so it’s often a single press rather than a double press. It should also be added that you can reprogram the button if you’d rather use it for something else.

Anyway, Ready For is Motorola’s way of connecting a mobile phone to a computer (preferably a Thinkpad, one must assume). To configure the functionality, install the Ready For app on your computer and scan the QR code when both your phone and computer are connected to the same Wi-Fi network. They should also be later when you are online, except for the Direct Surfzone function. It allows you to connect to a mobile hotspot to get online with the push of a button on your computer. In fact, it is not much easier than turning on the hotspot from the mobile phone and setting the computer to connect automatically.

A nice detail if you get stuck with Ready For is that a mini-menu appears on the edge of the mobile phone when Ready For is activated, and you choose which options should be there. If nothing else, it’s smooth.

In addition to the browsing area, Ready For makes it possible to open an application on the computer, start the mobile phone in desktop mode on the computer screen, use the mobile phone as a webcam and transfer files. These features are technically cool without being particularly useful.

A webcam, for example, is really cool, but when is it more useful to connect a mobile phone camera to your computer than just calling into any meeting with a mobile phone?

Open app and desktop mode are actually the same thing in different formats, they both allow you to run mobile apps with your computer screen, mouse cursor and keyboard, either on a computer-like desktop or in a separate application window. However, the user experience will be worse than running the app on the mobile phone. Partly because there are lags that make it sluggish, and partly because the graphics don’t scale so well on my computer that it’s ugly and pixelated. It may be because the computer is using Windows interface upgrade, but with Lenovo at both ends, one would think they should have been able to solve it better.

But above all, how many services are there that you can run on your mobile phone but not in your computer’s browser? SMS, maybe?

Speaking of SMS, Microsoft has its corresponding function for connecting a computer to a mobile phone, which on mobile is called Link to Windows. Among other things, it allows you to browse the photo gallery, receive mobile phone notifications on the computer, and read and write text messages. So there are no overlapping functions, which means if you want to use both functions, you must have two parallel connections between your computer and mobile. It would have been smoother had Motorola’s feature set been an extended part of Link to Windows (as Samsung did in its version).

Finally a useful function I think when I open file sharing, because it certainly happens that I want to access the files on the computer from the mobile phone. But no, it just works the other way around, i.e. I can download files from mobile to computer.

If you have a Thinkpad computer, the link between the mobile phone and the computer is called Think2 Think. In addition to the functions I described, you should also be able to cut and paste text between the mobile phone and the computer, as well as receive notifications on the computer. Since my Lenovo computer is not a Thinkpad, I wasn’t able to test this.

The fact that Thinkphone offers the option of encrypted folders and has antivirus and other security functions does not help, a mobile phone will never be the main storage place for important files for the simple reason that the risk of losing or breaking a mobile phone is much greater than a computer. If it’s a photo I want to transfer from a computer to a mobile phone, on the other hand, there are plenty of ways to do it, most of them simpler than Ready For.

So no, I can’t find any real use for the Thinkphone’s main selling point. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking it’s a nice phone, it’s fast, it has a good screen, and the sturdy back is easy to hold. Just don’t expect much from Say Thinkphone.

On the other side

Eric Morner: There will be more surface than actual benefits here. A handy feature is the Moto Keysafe, which adds an extra layer of security and can save passwords, PIN codes, and more in a secure environment separate from other data. However, there is another question, which is how much use you get from it in practice, that is, how much sensitive data of the kind you need to protect in your mobile phone.

questions and answers

Is there any additional work function in the mobile phone? A number of Microsoft applications are pre-installed, such as Outlook, Office, and Authenticator.

How does the red button work with Ready For? Basically, you go into an app, double-click the red button, select the type of connection, and that app appears on the computer.

How is the vibrator feedback? Soft and gentle.

substitute

Company mobile: Top Samsung models come in the Enterprise edition, which includes business management tools and foolproof updates. They also have PC integration similar to what Motorola has.

Camera example

I’m generally happy with the cameras’ sharpness and color reproduction even in the dark, but I can’t say they stand out.