Lenovo Elite ThinkPad W700ds
Posted by Jon Peddie and Robert Dow on March 3rd 2009 | Discuss
Categories:
Hardware Review
Tags:
Thinkpad Elite W700ds second screen with menu.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
OCR seems to be able to read anything.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Time to calibrate.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Color calibration sensor.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
FIGURE 1: Performance characteristics of some powerful computers.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Probably one of the most impressive machines we’ve played with in a while, the Lenovo dual-screen ThinkPad W700ds comes with a 2.53 GHz Intel Core2Duo processor with 4GB of DDR3, a 17-inch 1920 x 1200 main screen, a 10.4 inch 1366 768 second screen driven by a Nvidia FX 3700M, a 1.3 Mpixel camera, and a Ultanav tablet.
Make no mistake, this is a serious workstation, a portable workstation like nothing you, or we, have ever seen before, or even thought was possible.
Second screen
The second screen, which is a respectable 1366 x 768, can be used to park menus or a web page if you want to fill up the main screen with, say, a CAD drawing.
As most of you know, Peddie’s second law is: The more you can see, the more you can do. The W700ds makes it possible for you to do a lot more. I don’t know how many times I’ve been on the road, with my 17-inch laptop and wanted more screen space. In another part of this edition of MTTL you’ll see a report on a secondary monitor you can carry with you.
OCR
The built in OCR is amazing. I wrote, in cursive, with the pen, not making the best of penmanship grade for sure, and it deciphered it perfectly.
As you write on the tablet, the OCR puts up a box just below your scratching with the word it thinks you wrote. If it’s not correct, you strike through it and it disappears along with your scratching. The image above is a first pass and it got it all correctly—pretty impressive.
The pad’s primary purpose however, is for editing drawings and making annotations. We’ve used external Wacom tablets and this built-in unit behaves perfectly.
Color calibration
The laptop also offers almost perfect color calibration of the screen so what you see on the monitor is what gets printed (WYSIWYG.) To maintain that capability, the unit has to be calibrated periodically, and the computer has a timer program that wakes up at the appropriate time and reminds you to do the color calibration.
When the color calibration starts, you close the cover. Once closed, the screen is run through a series of colors and those colors are sensed and changed as necessary by the sensor in the base plate between the table and keyboard.
The stylus is lying on the keyboard (in the photo) pointing at the sensor.
How’d it compare?
Well, because of temperature management, it has a mid-range GPU and a dual core CPU, so what can you do with that? Turns out Lenovo did a lot, and it made a very favorable showing against deskside workstation boxes.
The smackdown Nehalem is the ultimate, but the Lenovo equipped with the Core2Duo holds its own as a now-generation laptop. Lenovo has packed a fistful of performance in the Elite ThinkPad W700ds. If you’ve got serious work to do, this is a portable you can confidently take on the road and not feel compromised.
Light, small, and cheap it’s not. If those are your criteria move on, there’s nothing here for you to see.
The unit weighs 3.8 kg (~8.4 pounds), measures 41.6 cm (~16 3/16 inches) wide, 30.1 cm wide (~12 1/8 inches), and 5.1 cm thick (~2 inches)—you got a problem with that? Real men carry real computers.
What do we think?
The Elite Thinkpad W700ds is a tour de force of modern technology that runs on a battery. This is not a machine for everyone, only the real power user who needs features like multiple display, a notepad and almost perfect WYSIWYG color capability. I happen to be such a person, and many of our clients are as well, so whereas this unit may not sell in the tens of millions, it should be very popular with those who need such features in the professional graphics industries like CAD, DCC, photo editing and illustration, analysis, and chemical engineering.
