Lenovo unleashes PC beast on mobile workstation market with ThinkPad W700

Lenovo today introduced the ThinkPad W700, a 17-inch wide-screen mobile workstation engineered with game-changing technologies and innovations to exceed the demands of the most data and graphics-intensive users.

Lenovo brings the industry's first built-in digitiser and colour calibrator to a mobile workstation and combines these innovations with first-in-market technologies such as new NVIDIA Quadro FX mobile graphics and supporting the upcoming Intel mobile quad core processor.

Other features such as optional dual hard drives with RAID configurations, up to 8GB of high speed DDR3 memory, a range of wireless connectivity options and excellent multimedia capabilities, including an optional Blu-ray DVD burner/player make the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation the standard-bearer for power and performance in a mobile workstation.

"Lenovo has engineered a new breed of mobile workstation with the ThinkPad W700," said Peter Hortensius, senior vice-president, Notebook Business Unit, Lenovo. "No other PC manufacturer has a mobile workstation that delivers the sheer power, performance and cutting-edge innovation that Lenovo has packed into the ThinkPad W700. The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation flat-out delivers the command performance our customers demand at the desk as well as in the field."

According to IDC, the compound annual growth rate for the worldwide mobile workstation market has been more than 60% per year since 2002. (1) The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation extends Lenovo's commitment to workstation users, complementing Lenovo's W500 mobile workstation and ThinkStation S10 and D10 workstations. As workers in fields such as digital content creation, computer-aided design and manufacturing, digital photography and science fields, including the oil and gas industries, become increasingly mobile, they are demanding the full-featured performance of a desktop workstation in a mobile workstation.

The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation takes customer-driven innovation to a new level with an optional built-in palm rest digitiser and colour calibrator. Lenovo and Intel collaborated to integrate the colour calibrator and digitiser into the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation. Designed for digital content creators and users, the mobile workstation's digitiser helps them easily configure an image, either mapping it to the entire screen or to an area defined by the user. High performance users, especially digital photographers, will benefit from models with the built-in colour calibrator as colour continues to play an important role in their work. The calibrator automatically adjusts the display's colour in up to half the time of many external calibrators and with higher accuracy, resulting in the most accurate, true-to-life images in an integrated package. Together with the upcoming Intel mobile quad core processor, multimedia designers and animators now have outstanding quad-core processor performance and true colour replication that is critical for realistic digital creations and workflow efficiencies.

Supporting the latest Intel processor technologies, including the upcoming mobile quad core processor, the mobile workstation can be configured with up to 8GB of memory with an additional 2GB of Intel Turbo Memory. Lenovo also offers models with Intel vPro technology for complete manageability. The mobile workstation can be equipped with dual internal hard drives, including solid state drive storage.

The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation offers both the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M and 3700M Open GL graphics processors with up to 1GB of dedicated video memory for exceptional graphics performance in a 17-inch mobile workstation. The hard drives can be configured for RAID 0 to help users access and save their data faster than traditional disk-writing methods, or users can choose RAID 1 for mirrored data redundancy.

The mobile workstation includes WiFi wireless connectivity. Additionally, users can connect to other devices wirelessly using mobile workstation models featuring Bluetooth and ultra wideband technology. Models supporting WiMax will be available later this year.

As the company's first product with a 17-inch display, the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation delivers an unparalleled viewing experience with a combination of leading technologies.

Its optional 400-nit WUXGA display provides up to twice the brightness of earlier ThinkPad mobile workstation models, and the 72% wide colour gamut provides more than 50% greater colour intensity. The high resolution, extreme brightness and wide colour gamut coupled with the NVIDIA Quadro FX MXM graphics solution results in a user experience unequalled in a mobile workstation today.

For external connectivity, the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation provides support for Dual Link DVI, Display Port and VGA. A 7-in-1 multi-card reader, and five USB ports give users flexibility in transferring and accessing digital content. Additionally, the workstation comes with an optional compact flash reader and Blu-ray DVD burner/player. An optional mini-dock extends the mobile workstation's capabilities with eSATA and digital audio ports as well as convenient cabling for power, external monitors and peripherals.

Packed for extreme performance, the mobile workstation also features BIOS/port disablement and an optional fingerprint reader, a smart card reader and hard drives with full-disk encryption. It will carry more than 20 certifications from independent software vendors.

"Our engineers use Lenovo ThinkStation workstations to help them design the next-generation Williams - Toyota FW31 racecars, aiming to make them faster and more agile, with greater performance than the competition," said Chris Taylor, IT manager, AT&T Williams. "We're thrilled to see Lenovo deliver the workstation performance we've come to rely on - now in a mobile, portable solution."

* Pricing and availability (2)

The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation will be available in September.