Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds Packs Second Screen

Lenovo is amping up the high end of its ThinkPad lin with a new version of the 17-inch W700...that packs an additional slide-out 10.6-inch display.

Computer maker Lenovo made a few eyes bug out with its ThinkPad W700 notebook last August, appealing to content creators with a 17-inch display and an integrated Wacom digitizing tablet. At January’s CES shows, however, Lenovo plans to up the ante with the ThinkPad W700ds which offers the features of the W700…plus an additional 10.6-inch slide-out LCD display, giving content creators, graphics fiends, and video mavens somewhere to put all those pesky palettes and controls while still seeing their work in full-screen glory.

In addition to the features in the W700—support for up to 8 GB of RAM, NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M GPU, up to 960 GB of storage (spread across an SSD and a traditional hard drive), optional Blu-ray support, an ExpressCard/54 slot, 802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, gigabit Ethernet, a 7-in-1 media card reader, and a passle of USB 2.0 ports—the W700ds will supposedly offer the brightest LCD screen on the market, and Lenovo will offer the option of going with an Intel Core 2 Quad processor rather than the 3 GHz Core 2 Extreme. The secondary display slides out from the main 17-inch display and is oriented in a portrait mode, offering another 768 by 1,280 pixels of play area for serious users. The idea is to bring the productivity enhancements of multiple-display setups to the notebook world—even though the secondary display makes to 11-pound W700 about 10mm thicker.

Lenovo hasn’t revealed pricing for the W700ds, but expect it to become available in January at prices starting around $3,000.