Editor's Note: Yes, this has been leaked on the blogs for weeks now but Lenovo today officially unveiled its Thinkpad W700ds work station today which is distinguished for its unique "dual-screen" capability. We named the W700 "laptop of the year" in our annual Gear of the Year list for 2008 and the new "ds" version seems even more intriguing. Read the full scoop in the press release below or check out this video walk-through on all the features of the laptop.


PRESS RELEASE

Lenovo Lays Stake on Prime Screen Real-Estate with Industry’s First Dual Screen Mobile Workstation

ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation brings ultimate intersection of innovation and performance

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – January 5, 2009: Lenovo today is bringing users the highest levels of mobile workstation innovation and performance with the introduction of the ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation. The ThinkPad W700ds gives users prime screen real-estate as the first mobile workstation in the industry with two screens. Lenovo combines a new balance of unique design with complex engineering and unparalleled performance to give users in the most demanding of fields such as digital content creation, oil and gas exploration, computer-aided design and photography, the ultimate mobile workstation.

“The ThinkPad W700ds dual screen mobile workstation challenged our international development team to engineer a notebook to fit the way workstation users work - in the office and on the road,” said Mark Cohen, vice president, Notebook Business Unit, Lenovo. “Bringing this level of innovation to the most extreme PC users required continually balancing size and functionality with keeping the PC cool and quiet. This mobile workstation is the result of where Lenovo innovation and performance intersect.”

To watch a video demonstration of the ThinkPad W700ds, click here.

The Power of Two
Because many workstation users typically work with two monitors, Lenovo designed the ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation with two screens to accommodate their work habits while on-the-go and to eliminate the compromise of having only one display when operating in a mobile environment. Research has shown that extra screen real-estate with multiple monitors helps maximize user productivity versus single display solutions.1 Measuring almost 40 percent of the 17-inch primary screen, the 10.6-inch second screen gives users extra screen real-estate, measuring approximately the size of a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook.

The second screen easily slides out from the PC cover behind the primary screen, and it can also be adjusted to fit a user’s viewing angle by up to 30 degrees, similarly to how a car’s rear view mirror tilts. This unique feature and test of engineering only adds a few millimeters in additional thickness to the mobile workstation over its predecessor, the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation.

The second screen complements the primary optional 400-nit WUXGA display, which provides up to twice the brightness of earlier ThinkPad mobile workstations. The primary screen’s 72 percent wide color gamut enables more than 50 percent greater color intensity for an uncompromised viewing experience.  

Intersection of Innovation and Performance
With its second screen, the ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation builds on the breakthrough capabilities offered in the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation that included the industry’s first built-in digitizer and color calibrator for mobile workstations.

Ideal for digital content creators and users, the optional digitizer provides high resolution, pressure high resolution, pressure sensitive control of the primary screen, the primary and the secondary screen or a specific defined area of either screen. Select models also come with a color calibrator that quickly and automatically adjusts the screen’s color to give true-to-life images and rendering 2D and 3D images, which are important items for digital content creators.

Professional photographer, Phil Borges commented, “The Lenovo ThinkPad W700 is the ultimate in portable workstations for photographers. The built in calibration and the ultra bright monitor make it possible for me to do work on the road that I would normally have to wait to do in the studio. The W700's two built-in hard drives make backing up photos while I'm on the road or in the studio a snap. Normally the process takes me a couple of hours, but with the W700 backup time is cut in half. Now the new ThinkPad W700ds takes it one step further with a second screen that allows me to move all my working palets to the second screen and gives me more real estate on the main screen for photo editing.”

The ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation gives users the latest technologies that are essential for work in data and graphics-intensive fields such as computer-assisted design, computer-aided manufacturing and others. Top processing and graphics performance includes choices of Intel® mobile quad core and extreme processors with optional dual hard drives with RAID configurations and choices of NVIDIA® Quadro FX mobile graphics. The mobile workstation offers up to 8 GB of high speed DDR3 memory and choices of solid state drive storage and traditional hard disk drives for a maximum of 960 GB of possible total storage. The mobile workstation also carries certifications from more than 20 independent software applications.

“The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation is a great example of the type of innovation that can be developed utilizing Intel’s most advanced processors,” said Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager, Mobile Platforms Group, Intel. “The Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme quad-core processor delivers the ultimate computing performance for mobile professionals, and we are very pleased that Lenovo’s newest mobile workstation runs on this advanced technology.”

The ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation offers a rich, customizable multimedia experience with optional ™ DVD burner/player and high speed UDMA compact flash reader, support for Dual Link DVI, Display Port and VGA, a 7-in-1 multicard reader and five USB ports. In addition to WiFi, for connectivity beyond the office, select models support WiMAX. Security features include an optional fingerprint reader, a smartcard reader and hard drives with full-disk encryption.

The powerhouse mobile workstation also balances functionality with staying cool and quiet. Lenovo engineered a dual thermal solution to keep the ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation running as cool as ThinkPad notebooks and quieter than the ambient noise in a typical office.  

Pricing and Availability
The ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation is available immediately through www.lenovo.com and business partners. Pricing for models starts at $3,663.

For b-roll of the ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation, click here.