You can now get the ThinkPhone by Motorola (from Lenovo) for as little as $400 at Lenovo US, a discount of $300 (about 43%). That is the cheapest price ever for a business smartphone that's less than 12 months old.
It achieves the rare balance of being a rugged smartphone (with IP68 rating) and classy, which is a sine qua non condition for a business device . Unlike most of its competitors, it offers the ability to buy extended warranty with accidental damage protection as well (including cracked screen) for a small premium.
The ThinkPhone is not a flagship smartphone but even then its Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB storage should give it enough firepower to smash through most non-gaming tasks.
It does play very nicely with Microsoft's ecosystem by integrating a Microsoft Teams walkie-talkie app and Windows 365 cloud capabilities via Moto Connect, making it perhaps the closest thing in 2023 to a Windows Mobile after the sad demise of Microsoft's own Surface Duo range.
We reviewed it earlier this year and found out that it was a "gorgeous slim, and powerful phone that has some excellent business tool features. We wish it was cheaper, had eSIMs and had a MicroSD card slot, but in almost every other respect, it is built for a purpose and probably worth the asking price".
Our reviewer liked the fact that it has powerful remote management features that very few handsets offer. It also runs Android 13 out of the box and will get OS updates for the next three years (till 2026) and security updates till 2027, in a bid to give system administrators more peace of mind.
