Lenovo set to intro dual-screen W700 notebook

Computer maker Lenovo will unveil a new, unique notebook at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January in the form of the ThinkPad W700ds. The dual screen PC sports a 17-inch main display and an attached 10.6-inch secondary display that comes out from the right side. Aimed at photographers, graphic artists, application developers, and those who work in CAD fields, the W700ds also differs from the standard, single-screen W700 in that it offers a less costly 2.26GHz Core 2 Quad processor as well as the 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme chip that serves as the main CPU in the standard notebook.

Incorporating the secondary 10.6-inch, 768x1280 display adds about 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) to the W700's thickness along with nearly 2lbs of weight. The spring-loaded display is housed in what Lenovo engineers call a "pocket door" configuration, which was one of five different design concepts. The display can be angled by as much as 30 degrees toward the user.

Most of the hardware specs of the W700 are expected to carry over to the W700ds, including its NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M graphics card, up to 8GB of RAM and available dual hard disk drives that can be set up in a RAID array. Battery life at full brightness is rated at a disappointing two hours. Connections on the W700 include dual-link DVI, DisplayPort and VGA for connecting to external displays. The W700ds will be capable of running on Windows XP or Vista, as well as the upcoming Windows 7, along with Linux' Red Hat and Ubuntu distributions.

It is expected that the W700ds will be some $500 costlier than the standard W700, which starts at about $2,460, though an official price is not yet known. [via eWeek]