At last - a laptop workstation alternative
As the number of dinky low-power Netbooks - mini-notebook PCs - seems to expand on a weekly basis, it's good to know that there are some viable machines at the other end of the power scale.
Lenovo - the Far Eastern company that acquired IBM's PC Computing division back in 2005 - has released its first ThinkPad with a quad-core processor.
This is the first laptop with a quad-core low-power chipset, although Clevo is already shipping laptops with desktop quad-core CPUs, and Dell has promised its first quad-core notebook, code-named the M6400, in early 2009.
The Lenovo ThinkPad W700, one of the first to be designed as a workstation alternative, will be available from next month and offers close to a terabyte of storage.
Targeted at business users such as digital content creators who need solid graphics and data crunching capabilities, Lenovo says the laptop was in development for 18 months and builds on the quiet success of its baby brother, the ThinkPad W500, introduced earlier this year.
The super-laptop sports a 17-inch screen and 8 gigabytes of RAM, which is enough to run multiple applications and even operating systems (Windows, Unix etc.) in parallel and in real time.
This is a significant move by Lenovo, as it's the first power laptop that displays video with a 1920-by-1200 pixel resolution.
Despite all the power, the machine will sell for around $2,980 in the US initially when it ships in September, with UK shipments expected before the end of the year.
