08/12/2008, 7:25am, EDT
Tuesday, August 12thLenovo ThinkPad W700 targets artists
Lenovo on Tuesday pushed into an unfamiliar area with the ThinkPad W700. The system is the PC builder's first 17-inch system and is unusual in its focus on artists, designers, and other visual editors that would often choose Macs instead; the area to the right of the trackpad includes a stylus-oriented digitizer that can be used for precise drawing in content creation tools. It can also be mapped for the entire screen and serve as a full trackpad replacement.
Image quality on the built-in screen is also considered important, Lenovo says. The screen is not only a sharper 1920x1200 but has a much higher than normal 72 percent NTSC color gamut along with a built-in color calibrator to optimize the image as closely as possible to its true colors for print and other color-accurate work.
As Lenovo's largest notebook, the W700 also has performance features absent from earlier designs, including the option of a 3.06GHz Core 2 Extreme dual-core processor, an 8GB memory ceiling, and two hard drive bays with the option of either a RAID 0 stripe for speed or a RAID 1 mirror for backups. The onboard NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M or 3700M video both pushes faster 3D and also supplies video out over the new DisplayPort format as well as dual-link DVI, either of which can handle 30-inch displays.
A base W700 ships with a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, an inexpensive 1440x900 display, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a single 160GB hard drive, and 802.11n Wi-Fi at a $2,949 price. Options exist both for the better processor and display as well as up to 640GB of storage, solid-state drives and a Blu-ray burner. Shipments start for the new ThinkPad by early September.
Filed under: computers, industry
Other story tags: Intel, blu-ray, NVIDIA, Core 2, Lenovo, ThinkPad, Quadro
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bendova
Wow, a "stylus oriented digitizer" (you mean, a graphics tablet?) that is the size of a post-it note! Artists will be flocking no doubt to this laptop that costs more than a Mac, and won't be able to run all the software they are using now.
In actuality: this is a PC for the artists wannabes who think WordArt is really creative and cool.
Doofuses.
MacNN
Please explain again how news of a new Windows-based laptop is Mac news?
ebeyer
Erm, because this is an Electronista posting not MacNN? Maybe MacNN needs to sort the newsfeed out so that the sites don't get a merged feed.
@ebeyer
This is the "Electronista" section of the site, not MacNN.
Granted, it's uglier than sin and I can't find a single word about the battery life (which is a bad sign), but it's nice to see how the other side lives.
Just love it
Its more expensive than a Mac,
Its MUCH uglier than a Mac,
It has two hard drives, cause you know, artists need lots of disk space,,,,,,, er,,,,, right?
I cannot believe how these companies flounder so when it comes to making an intelligent product.
Just a thought.
I like the keyboard
For once a company got the keyboard right and actually used the extra space that is available on a wider laptop.
re: keyboard
Note on the MacBook Pro the space is used by nice laptop speakers.
Artists love music... This thing probably has a crappy mono speaker somewhere. Yeah artists need the number pad, right...
Not a Mac killer
This thinkpad is no Mac killer. Nice to imagine that a Wintel vendor is thinking about the creative who use machines with these features, but when I compare cost, OS and familiarity, there is no way a Macpro user would ever go to one of these.
Now if Apple came out the a graphic artists edition 17 inch laptop, I might go for it, if it included a few mods. Things like: built in media card reader, top-end screen, higher-res isight, mobile quad core and a touch-graphics pad. I'd be all over it.
Looking forward to what Sept. brings. I'm in the market for a new portable.
re:: re: keyboard
I have no idea what speakers that thinkpad has but my thinkpad has 2 speakers mounted in the front of the unit and provides stereo sound.
I'd rather have a full keyboard with 10 key and see the speakers mounted somewhere else but it could just be personal pref!
Will they make a model
for left handed folk? Doesn't really matter to me, since I won't be buying one, but I'm just sayin'.