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Lenovo Intros the Monstrous ThinkPad W700
Engadget recently got their hands on an early delivery of Lenovo's new powerhouse of a laptop, the W700. Aimed at graphic artists and photographers, this beast is designed to really pack a punch. No word on how much for the extra fusion generator to power it for longer than 20 minutes. "Containing enough computational artillery to level a small village, this for-creatives-only behemoth is designed for sheer pixel pushing ... and little else. The system packs in two features aimed at graphic artists and photographers which are fairly unique to a laptop: a built in Wacom digitizer just to the right of the trackpad, and an on-board color calibrator. But what's happening under the hood you ask? Well, for starters the 17-incher sports the first-ever Intel Quad Core Extreme CPU in a laptop (no word on speeds at this point) as well as the first showing of NVIDIA's Quadro FX 3700 graphics chipset (with a hefty 1GB of memory on-board). The workstation also serves up dual hard drive bays configurable as RAID 0 or 1 (SSD or traditional disk, naturally), up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an optional Blu-ray burner. Of course, that's fully kitted out -- the W700 starts at $2,978 and moves skyward from there."
...can it run Vista/Linux/?
Apple needs to step up and try to match this.
The Wacom tablet is on the right of the trackpad, a very inconvenient place for us left-handers. Just another example example of the man trying to keeps us down.
a built in Wacom digitizer just to the right of the trackpad
Ideal unless you're left handed and therefore cursed to spend all your time catching the trackpad while trying to write/draw anything.
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I predict that by the end of this year Thinkpads will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Funniest part? It's creatives who use Macs, exclusively. Having worked for many media companies, they only consider Macs. This beast will maybe find some gamers who like it. The rest--nah...
... (she's a graphic designer):
"Ooooooh!" (based on in-built Wacom thingie). - Interest level: High
Seconds later, "But it's not a Mac!" - Interest level: None
In other news, TSA agents are salivating of anticipation.
What, apart from all those other laptops that have offered SLI for a year or more?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
It was, until someone sued them for back trauma after lifing one. It's now called a Non Tethered Personal Workstation
Left-handed users everywhere are cheering the W700, with its digitizer thoughtfully placed on the right so they won't inadvertently jog it when using the trackpad. "It might make more sense to turn the entire area in front of the keyboard into a trackpad/digitizer with software control," said Sandy Sinister of the Southpaw Liberation Army, "but instead they struck a blow for the cause! We're buying ten for our new HQ at Undisclosed Location."
No AC, IBM laptops were built by Lenovo for years (after they moved Laptop manufacturing from Greenock, UK) before they sold the home computing division.
The Lenovo monster is just barely transporable, but so is a desktop.
It blows my mind how WHINEY techy people are today. Just barely transportable? what are you incredibly weak and cant carry that much weight?
Cripes I carry around over 45 pounds in my backpack daily. on my back on the bike, in my hand up the stairs. and this laptop would make no difference in my day. Take out all my test gear that makes up the most of my weight problems. Plus the Toughbook I carry weighs twice what this could soaking wet.
It's VERY transportable. If I can lift it and carry it without hurting my back or getting winded walking up 3 flights of stairs, it's incredibly transportable.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Anyone interested in a digitiser probably already has one, and a separate one is more flexible and probably better than a fixed one.
Analyzer schmanalyzer.
Take those out and you have an OK power laptop.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Bullshit. I have a T43 and a relatively new T61... The T61 easily matches the T43 in terms of build quality, and both of them are rock solid compared to my wife's MacBook.
It might be an urban legend, but I thought lefties were disproportionally represented in the heavily artistic fields. If that is true, it indicates they should offer left handed models if they are targeting that market niche.
I deal with pictures occasionally in my job, and I've had to manually/ocularly calibrate my monitors more than once. Big pain, especially when you don't have adequate lighting in the room.
The automatic calibration video really struck me as innovative, though nowhere close to game-changing, at least for a portable monitor. However, I don't understand where the system gets color information from.
The laptop has a camera on top of the LCD, so if there were, say, a tiny mirror near the trackpad it could see the monitor when the lid's down; but I see no reflective surface in the keyboard area--how does it see the monitor ouput?
Anyone care to share their take (or knowledge) on this? Just curious...
It's nothing sinister.
sinister
Etymology : From Latin sinister ("left hand") via Old French Sinistra ("left"), Middle English Sinistre ("unlucky").
As a Lefty, I'd like to say: get some new material. ;)
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Are you sure you aren't referring to Lenovo's non-Thinkpad lines (N series, etc)? Those are made of plastic and are not designed much like the Thinkpads at all. The Thinkpad series itself is still a very durable line...I'd put them at the top of the 'standard' laptop scale with regards to ruggedness, the best thing short of a Panasonic Toughbook.
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Well I was mildly intrigued about this when I read the headline and assumed they had integrated a WACOM screen into the display but that would have been just another tablet laptop with a CINTIQUE built in! Instead they give you the crappiest of WACOM tablets hammered into the right of the trackpad. I don't know anyone that uses a WACOM for anything professional that can stand anything less than the 6x8 size. Having thrown together a 12" WACOM display from an old 14x9 USB Tablet and a 12" HD LCD Display I can say that the closer the size and ratio is to what you're drawing the better it is. For a laptop screen the 6x8 is about a 2:1 for distance which makes drawing a circle only mildly a pain in the ass. On the 4x3" it's #&@!%# impossible thus drawing most organic shapes becomes a lesson in interpretive art.
They are disabling your latte due to a bug in Java. Ewwwww
Did you not see that Lenovo has made IBM Thinkpads for years? And no, being (pretending to be?) a level 1 tech support monkey for IBM doesn't make you any more of an official resource.
:P
Now, as far as 'valid real world' experience goes, I have quite a bit. I work with all brands of laptops on a daily basis. I replace internal and external parts, rework them etc... I've worked on scores and scores of Thinkpads, including many T4Xs and T6Xs. In my opinion, they are well-built compared to *any* other major notebook brand (HP, Dell, Acer, Tosbhia etc..) and just as well built as the T2Xs and T3Xs. I even used to own a T21 AND T30, both of which I put together using parts and reassembled/disassembled numerous times.
In short, when it comes to build quality, my opinion is better than yours.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Yeah, but can you bulls-eye womp rats in your T61?
Hell is other people's code.
Actually, most, if not all, of the notebooks and PCs in the world are manufactured in China and other countries of the Pacific Rim. Lenovo, in particular, has been making the IBM Thinkpads for years. It is only recently that they are being sold under the Lenovo brand rather than IBM. Odds are that your Manhattan publishing house friends are using "off market Chinese crap" with an IBM, Apple, HP/Compaq or some other name brand label on it. Oh, yeah, those Macs your developer friends are using were manufactured in the Pacific Rim as well.
It's a very dark ride.