Lenovo presents the ThinkPhone by Motorola – inspired by ThinkPad laptops

Smartphones have turned the B2B market for phones upside down within the last decade. Together, Android and iOS phones have ended the era of specialized business smartphones, an era exemplified by Research in Motion (RIM) and the Blackberry brand. Enterprise smartphones are just mainstream consumer smartphone models up to this point.

A company apparently still believes that making a more enterprise-targeted smartphone has value. Lenovo is certainly a manufacturer with deep knowledge of that market sector, given its longstanding brand of ThinkPad laptops designed specifically for large institutional customers. In the time since Lenovo took over the IBM PC division, the brand has also been brought to desktop computers (ThinkCenter), workstations (ThinkStation) and servers (ThinkSystem). Missing from this list: Smartphones. Until now.

At CES, Lenovo is announcing a further extension of the Think brand with the new Lenovo ThinkPhone – or more precisely, the Lenovo ThinkPhone by Motorola. Of course, Lenovo is taking advantage of the fact that it owns Motorola Mobility, making the ThinkPhone as much a Lenovo as a Motorola phone.

For its first smartphone outing, Lenovo is opting for a high-end platform in the form of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 — though in doing so, it’s picking up a chip from last year. This CPU is accompanied by UFS 3.1 memory up to 512 GB, 128 and 256 GB are also available. There are also RAM options, as there will also be an 8GB and 12GB version.

All of this sits inside a rugged IP68 frame made from aircraft-grade aluminum and an Aramid polymer back with a carbon fiber look – along with the ThinkPhone logo, this gives the Motorola ThinkPhone a look similar to Lenovo’s ThinkPad line. The same goes for the red button on the left side – which looks like a ThinkPad TrackPoint, although here, this red button simply functions as a customizable key. The frame also features the 6.6-inch pOLED display with FHD+ resolution. This is one aspect where the ThinkPhone seems to lack the competition; Lenovo also doesn’t mention whether the display supports a refresh rate higher than 60Hz.

As for the battery, ThinkPhone has a capacity of 5000 mAh. It also comes with a 68W TurboPower charger, which Lenovo says can charge even a typical ThinkPad laptop like the new X1 Carbon G11. When it comes to cameras, the ThinkPhone from Motorola has three: a 50 MP main camera, a 13 MP ultra-wide camera and a 32 MP front camera. The main camera has optical image stabilization, but no optical zoom.

A bit disappointing for a Think device: There’s no microSD port and no 3.5mm audio. Also, the single USB C port only supports “USB 3.1”. At least the ThinkPhone supports WiFi 6E.

Motorola’s ThinkPhone will ship with Android 13 and be equipped with a suite of enterprise and productivity features. Lenovo hasn’t given us a concrete release date for Motorola’s ThinkPhone. What was announced was that the Lenovo ThinkPhone will be released in the US, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Australia and select Asian countries, including China, in the coming months. Local pricing hasn’t been announced yet either.