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The Lenovo ThinkPhone by Motorola is a collaboration nine years in the making

The Lenovo ThinkPhone by Motorola is a collaboration nine years in the making

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Motorola’s first phone designed with parent company Lenovo’s branding is chock-full of security and productivity features.

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It’s usually tough to get excited about a rugged phone for enterprise customers, but the ThinkPhone by Motorola is a little different. It’s the first co-branded device since Lenovo bought the mobile company nine years ago and, unsurprisingly, is designed to work with Lenovo’s ThinkPad laptops. It’s heavy on security features and ThinkPad integrations, like a shared clipboard and automatic connection over Wi-Fi, along with a durable exterior and a customizable red button that look right at home with the company’s PC line.

The ThinkPhone uses a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset — not the very latest from Qualcomm but still an extremely capable processor. It offers a big 6.6-inch OLED screen and two rear cameras (plus a depth sensor): a 50-megapixel stabilized standard wide and a 13-megapixel ultrawide.

The ThinkPhone has two rear cameras and a depth sensor.
The ThinkPhone has two rear cameras and a depth sensor.
Close up of the lower rear case of the Motorola ThinkPhone.
The back of the phone bears familiar branding.

Other trappings of a modern flagship phone are here, too: fast 68W wired charging (with the included charger!), 15W wireless charging, a big 5,000mAh battery, sub-6GHz 5G, and an IP68 rating for healthy dust and water resistance. It’s also MIL-STD 810H certified, meaning it stands up to some additional abuse not included in the IP68 rating, like vibrations and freezing temperatures. The exterior is made of aramid fiber for a look and durability that matches the ThinkPad ethos.

But what about enterprise features for IT administrators?? Rest easy: the ThinkPhone has it covered. There’s a Moto Secure app that acts as a hub for security features that IT may need remote access to, like lock screen settings and network alerts. There’s a separate Moto KeySafe processor to add security for things like PINs and passwords.

Image of ThinkPad, ThinkPhone, charging brick, and USB cable on a table top.
The ThinkPhone comes with a 68W wired charger that’s also suitable for a laptop.
Image: Motorola

There are some potentially useful features designed for use with ThinkPads, too, which Lenovo calls Think 2 Think connectivity. A ThinkPhone and ThinkPad can connect to each other automatically when nearby and on the same Wi-Fi network. There’s a shared clipboard that lets you copy and paste text and images from one device to the other, and phone notifications can appear on the PC screen. You can use the ThinkPhone as a webcam, which sounds a lot like Apple’s continuity camera, and a one-click hotspot connection from the PC. The phone will ship with Android 13, and will get three years of OS version upgrades and four years of security updates — not too shabby.

There’s no price yet for the ThinkPhone; Motorola spokesperson Stephanie Stiltz says that information will come “closer to availability.” The phone will arrive “in the coming months,” according to today’s press release, and will be sold in the US, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Australia, along with “select countries across Asia.”

Yeah, there’s a red nub.
Yeah, there’s a red nub.