enovo Launches 17-inch ThinkPad Workstation

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n Tuesday launched its W700 ThinkPad Workstation, and it's beyond anything you would ever imagine on a laptop. This is Lenovo's first venture into the 17-inch space, which is evident by the unflattering 8.3-pound frame. But if you're a high-end content creator, everything else will simply amaze you.

The WUXGA (1,920-by-1,200) 17-inch widescreen is also an RGB display, which you'll see a lot more of in upcoming laptop workstations. According to Lenovo, the screen boasts a wider color gamut, displaying up to 72 percent of Adobe RGB color space when typical laptop displays are around 45 percent. What will grab your attention is not the screen, but the integrated objects that are used to maximize the screen's capabilities.

Rather than digitize the 17-inch screen like the ThinkPad X61 Tablet, Lenovo adds a Wacom-enabled palm-rest digitizer. It looks like an oversized touchpad and measures 120 by 80 centimeters, occupying the right side of the palm rests. You can write on this pad with the digitized pen as if it were a tablet. A unique touch is the three sensors above the Wacom pad, which represent an X-Rite Pantone color calibrator used in standalone LCDs. Besides having these sensors integrated into the laptop, the advantage of putting them there is that you can close the lid, preventing light from filtering through and making calibrating the display that much more effective. Included with the colorimeter is Pantone's hueyPro Software.




Optional features like a CF card slot and a Blu-ray burner are particularly useful for professional photographers. If storage is high on the priority list, the W-Series has configurations with dual spinning hard drives, dual SSDs, or one of each, and can even accept a third drive if you swap it in place of the optical drive for a potential total of 960GB (3 x 320GB drives). There are a host of connectivity ports, including DisplayPort, eSATA, DVI-Out, and VGA-Out.

With the launch of the Intel Core 2 Quad-Core Extreme, the W700 will be one of the first workstations to integrate this powerful mobile processor. It also accepts up to 8GB of DDR3 memory and will feature nVidia's latest workstation graphics card—the Quadro FX 3700M or the Quadro FX 2700M, with up to 1GB of video memory.

At $3,500, the W700 won't be easy on the corporate budget, but it's highly configurable, so you can opt out of many of these high-end features and settle for a plain old desktop-replacement laptop
ref http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2327813,00.asp