Motorola ThinkPhone builds on Lenovo’s legacy with ThinkPad PC integration

Ben Schoon | Jan 5 2023 - 8:03 am PT

Coming this year for enterprise customers, the Motorola ThinkPhone celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Lenovo ThinkPad lineup with a custom smartphone built for business customers that has a few fun tricks up its sleeve.

The Motorola ThinkPhone is, at its core, a pretty standard flagship smartphone. You’ll get Android 13 out of the box with four years of updates, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip, 8GB or 12GB of RAM, 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage, and a 6.6-inch pOLED display. There’s also a 5,000 mAh battery under the hood with 68W wired charging and 15W wireless charging.

What makes the ThinkPhone stand out, rather, is how it’s being built to work with Lenovo’s iconic ThinkPad laptops.

The ThinkPhone is designed to mimic the look of those laptops, with a stronger-than-steel weave on the back panel and Gorilla Glass Victus up front to live up to a MIL-STD-810H durability rating. It also has a “red key” which is a button that can serve a few functions, including opening the app of your choice.

Motorola and Lenovo have also built the phone with support for “Think 2 Think,” a special software suite that lets the ThinkPhone and a ThinkPad laptop talk to each other in some useful ways. This includes a unified clipboard, notifications sync, file drops, streaming Android apps on your laptop, “Instant Connect” which connects the two devices over Wi-Fi, as well as the ability to start the phone’s hotspot from the laptop. Perhaps the most interesting option is the ability to use the ThinkPhone as a wireless webcam for a ThinkPad, including all lenses on the back of the device and using that webcam in any app.

Lenovo and Motorola tell us that most of these features will work on Windows 10 or Windows 11 machines even if they aren’t ThinkPad branded.

The ThinkPhone’s cameras include a 50MP primary camera, 13MP ultrawide, and a depth sensor on the back, as well as a 32MP front-facing camera. The phone also supports an in-display fingerprint sensor and DisplayPort out via its USB-C port.

Pricing on the Motorola ThinkPhone remains unclear, but the device is being aimed primarily at the enterprise market.