Lenovo Announces W700, 17-inch Desktop Killing Notebook

Lenovo, the same company that makes the incredibly thin Thinkpad X200 and X300 (and now small IdeaPad S10), is introducing a 17-inch, 8.3-pound behemoth, the W700, which is sure to make other notebooks quiver in fear, more from its performance than its size. The ultrapowerful workstation, which starts at $2,978 and ships in September, has the kind of horsepower to make even graphic designers, video editors, and CAD users, ditch their desktops. The W700′s jaw-dropping features include:

• Core 2 Extreme Processor, available in Quad Core
• Dual hard drives, available in RAID or with SSD
• NVIDIA Quadro FX Mobile Graphics with up to 1GB of video memory.
• A 17-inch 1920×1200 resolution screen with 72% gamut display
• On-board color calibrator, calibrates the screen in less three minutes with lid closed.
• Built-in WACOM Digitizer
• Up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM

We had a chance to see a W700 in-person two weeks ago when some Lenovo reps stopped by our office for a quick demonstration. While we didn’t have quality time alone with this super-charged system, we were blown away by what we saw. Lenovo opened a series of huge, uncompressed RAW images in just a few short seconds and paged through them as easily as if they were small JPEGs. While an 8.3-pound laptop is probably too heavy to lug to Starbucks for an afternoon latte, it’s positively puny when compared to the combination of a desktop, monitor, keyboard, and mouse you would have to carry to match its power. You can also leave the Wacom tablet at home, since a stylus pops out of the side of the laptop and a pad is located to the right of the trackpad. Lenovo expects the W700 to be a hit with graphics professionals like photographers who need tons of processing power, super-accurate screens, and gobs of high-speed storage. After all, if you’re a wedding photographer who is used to carrying a carload of cameras and lights with you to a job, what’s another 8 pounds of notebook?