Hello Moto, Lenovo’s New ThinkPhone

Lenovo Makes Use Of Their Motorola Purchase

Lenovo gave us a surprise at CES with a new ThinkPhone, running Android 13 on a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip.  It is a rather rugged phone and probably doesn’t need a case with it’s IP68 rating that means it is dust resistant can handle immersion in still, fresh water up 1.5 metres for 30 minutes.  That puts it in the same class as the iPhone 14 Pro, Galaxy S22 Ultra and Pixel 7 Pro, if you were shopping for a rugged phone.

As you might expect, Lenovo is aiming at businesses and along with the phone comes their own MDM infrastructure, called Moto OEMConfig and Moto Device Manager.  It can also pair with a ThinkPad via Think 2 Think that will allow you to drag and drop files or copy and paste between the two devices over a WiFi connection.  In addition you can set your Windows notifications on your ThinkPad to display phone notifications and even use either the 8K 50 megapixel rear camera or 32 megapixel front camera as your webcam on calls.  

Deployment should be easy, the phone has Microsoft 365, Outlook, and Teams mobile apps preloaded and Lenovo claims the ThinkPhone requires no configuration to deploy to a new user.  All of this is great, but as The Register points out the real test will be how aggressive Lenovo is at deploying upgrades and security patches.