Editors’ Note: Parts of this article were taken from our original Lenovo ThinkPad W700 review.
Barely a month after Lenovo redefined the ho-hum workstation with an integrated digitizer and color calibrator in the ThinkPad W700, it now looks to shake up the computing world once again with a quad-core version. That’s right, quad-core. This iteration of the W700 is the world’s first notebook to feature Intel’s blazing-fast 2.53-GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme Q9300 mobile processor. This chip specializes in steamrolling through multi-threaded applications (programs designed to utilize multiple cores to enable faster processing) by utilizing four complete execution cores within a single processor. The turbo-charged W700 may require deep wallets with its $4,949 price tag, but with the high cost comes performance that few machines can touch.
Design
There’s no mistaking the clean lines and familiar matte black finish of a ThinkPad, and despite its size, the W700 maintains that look. Lenovo’s largest ThinkPad ever measures 16.1 x 12.2 x 1.6 inches and weighs 8.8 pounds, which is pretty much in line with other desktop replacements. Its power brick, too, is one of the biggest and heaviest we’ve seen, measuring 6.7 x 3.3 x 1.5 inches and weighing 1.8 pounds.
Lenovo makes good use of the W700’s spacious deck. The classic ThinkPad keyboard is roomy and comfortable and has a separate number pad to the right. ThinkPad fans will appreciate the familiar pointing stick or opt to use the touchpad for cursor control. Both are responsive and easy to reach, but the touchpad is quite small.
Built-in Tablet and Color Calibrator
To the right of the touchpad is a 5.1 x 3.2-inch Wacom digitizer pad, which comes with a stylus pen that can be stashed away in its holder on the right side of the system. The pad felt a bit too sensitive at first, but after using the Tablet PC Pen Training utility we used the pad and stylus as a mouse controller with relative ease. It also took a few tries to get the handwriting recognition feature to recognize our penmanship, but after 15 minutes or so of practice (also in the Tablet PC Pen Training utility) we could write full sentences without any recognition errors. Still, it’s a tedious process that requires patience to be used effectively.
We used the digitizer to touch up a picture in Photoshop and to draw a sketch in Microsoft Paint. In both cases, the digitizer performed well, registering our inputs accurately both in terms of speed and pressure. However, we found it more difficult when using the lower part of the pad; its location on the deck made it impossible for us to rest our hand on the notebook itself. This isn’t an issue with a traditional digitizer, which has a low profile, but on the W700, it’s 1.3 inches above the desk, making it less comfortable.
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