While big-screen notebooks have become popular these days, Lenovo has taken the trend one step further. Its ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation has two screens, together with a quad-core processor and the best graphics this side of a desktop PC. (According to Lenovo, the notebook will be available as soon as it is officially announced at CES in early January.)
In other words, Lenovo’s new notebook bends and breaks many of the rules of mobility. But beware: This weighty notebook has a weighty price tag to match — slightly over $5,000.
At 11.1 lbs. and measuring a gargantuan 2.2 by 16.1 by 12.2 in., the ThinkPad W700ds is about as big as a notebook gets these days — for example, it’s half an inch thicker and two pounds heavier than Toshiba’s Qosmio X305. With its huge AC adapter, the W400ds has a ponderous travel weight of 13.2 lbs. That’s the weight equivalent of four of Apple’s MacBook Air systems; it’s sure to overwhelm any airline tray table.
Clothed in ThinkPad basic black, the W700ds has the best components available, starting with a 2.53-GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor that has four independent processing cores, 6MB of L2 cache and 64-bit operations. There’s also 4GB of memory, an 8X DVD burner and a pair of 250GB, 5,400-rpm hard drives that are set up to stripe data across the disks (higher-performance 7,200-rpm drives are also an option). Whether it’s for working with a CAD file or making sense of a large Excel file, no notebook on sale today even comes close to this computational monster.
A display two-fer
As if the system’s main 17-in. display were not enough, touch the display’s right side and a unique 10.6-in. screen pops out. The resulting composite screen can show images with resolution of up to 3200 by 1968 pixels, although there’s an annoying 1-in. black strip separating the two displays.
This innovative graphics setup is powered by Nvidia’s Quadro FX 3700M video processor with 1GB of dedicated video memory. The processor has the ability to grab another 1.8GB from system memory, giving it a total of 2.8GB of video memory.
It took me a little while to get used to the dual-screen setup, but I found that it worked surprisingly well. You can physically angle the smaller screen as well as drag and drop items between the two displays.
At one point, I dedicated the smaller screen to watching for incoming e-mails, while I worked with Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the main screen. Then I set the notebook up with a Photoshop image on the main screen and the application’s color and brush controls on the smaller display. Later, I used the entire field of view and worked with a large 3-D CAD model while monitoring an eBay auction.
More than the displays
The ThinkPad W700ds is more than a one-trick pony. It’s the first traditional notebook to include, along with the usual 2.8- by 1.4-in. touchpad, a second 5.0- by 3.2-in. touchpad that can be used for controlling the cursor, signing digital documents, sketching a map or just doodling. There’s even a handy place on the side for stowing the included stylus.
Although visuals dominate the scene with the W700ds, letters, symbols and numbers matter as well. The notebook has a keyboard that is on a par with that of a desktop PC — it offers 18.7mm keys that have a generous 2.4mm of depth and a separate numeric pad. As a night owl, my favorite keyboard feature is the pair of LED lights that illuminate the keys.
For those who prefer a pointing stick over a touchpad (or vice versa), the system has both; there is also the now-expected fingerprint scanner.
Around its edge, the W400ds has an array of ports that’s second to none in the notebook world. In addition to the expected connectors for USB (five of them), FireWire and audio, the W700ds also includes three ports for external monitors (VGA, DVI and the newer DisplayPort) as well as two Express Card slots.
Dock of the day
For those who split their time between the road and an office, the W400ds has a convenient docking station that can power the system, has a good variety of ports and adds four USB ports as well as a SATA connector for hooking up a hard drive. A bonus is that it uses the same — albeit large — AC adapter. On the downside, neither the system nor the dock has an HDMI connector for mating it with a large-screen monitor (as is the case with HP’s HDX Pavilion 9203 notebook).
It’s no surprise that the W700ds is a communications powerhouse with Gigabit Ethernet as well as 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless networking. There’s a 1.3-megapixel webcam on top of the display.
As far as software is concerned, there’s Lenovo’s usual group of helpful utilities — software for connecting to Wi-Fi networks, creating a recover DVD, managing power use, updating software and more. There are also apps for using the stylus, videoconferencing (using Skype) and calibrating the color on the system’s monitors. The system uses Windows Vista Business with Service Pack 1 updates and has a one-year warranty.
All this adds up to the most powerful notebook I’ve seen. It attained a phenomenal score of 1,210.9 on PassMark’s Performance Test 6.1, about 50% higher than HP’s Pavilion HDX 9203 and closer to a gaming desktop PC or high-end workstation. The system’s 7,800 milliamp-hour battery pack was able to power the system for a reasonable 2 hours and 34 minutes on a charge while working on a wireless network. While the Wi-Fi is able to move only a middling 12.3Mbit/sec. of data over an 802.11g link five feet from the router, it had an exceptional range of 150 feet.
While vendors such as Acer, Toshiba and HP employ big-screen notebooks in the name of entertainment, the ThinkPad W700ds is all about business, making it perfect for everything from editing video to working with high-end computation and visualization programs.
It’s true that, at a price of over $5,000, the notebook is about as expensive as it gets these days. (You can drop the price to $3,600 if you’re willing to accept a single screen one with one hard drive, but what fun is that?) However, if your work (or play) requires this level of power and performance, it’s well worth the price and weight.
Brian Nadel is a freelance writer based near New York and is the former editor in chief of Mobile Computing & Communications magazine.
