It"s CES season, which means that we""re about to see a whole bunch of laptops being announced. This year, Lenovo is starting its ThinkPad refreshes a bit earlier, as last year"s was in January. Today, the company announced the ThinkPad L390 and the L390 Yoga.
All of last year"s ThinkPads used eighth-generation Intel processors, as do this year"s, but since Intel"s naming scheme is rather confusing, these are actually different chips. Last year, it was all about Kaby Lake R, and this year they actually have Whiskey Lake CPUs, which means around a 15% boost in performance.
Lenovo is calling its biometric security setup ThinkShield, and that includes dTPM 2.0, the fingerprint sensor, and an IR camera for facial recognition. While fingerprint readers have been shipping on ThinkPads for years, the IR camera only first showed up in last year"s model.
There"s also a world-facing camera on the Yoga model. The camera is on the keyboard, so when you fold the display back and use it as a tablet, you have a rear camera.
The rest is what you"d expect from something called the ThinkPad L390. It has a 13.3-inch 1080p display, and the body is MIL-STD 810G certified, which means that it"s pretty rugged.
The Lenovo ThinkPad L390 and L390 Yoga will be available this month, starting at $659 and $889, respectively.