I was lucky enough to see this two-headed powerhouse laptop at a friend who's way more luckier getting one for a test. This heavyweight weighs around 13 pounds and the chunky chassis won’t squeeze into most notebook bags. Fortunately, Lenovo has one large-enough case for around $60. The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds looks like a notebook with a notebook growing out of it. A 10.6 inch screen slides out beside the 17-inch main display, creating 39% more desktop space. Our W700ds came with a 2.53GHz Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9300 processor. This power CPU is great for some multicore applications. This system had 4GB of RAM, two hard drives configured in a RAID array, and nVidia Quadro FX3700M workstation graphics; and Windows Vista Business 64-bit.
The W700ds performed well on game and benchmark tests. Hopefully I could get more data next time. The battery in the W700ds lasted about three and a half hours, which was pretty much decent as we had the secondary screen stowed. But running the battery test with the screen activated, the battery life dropped by almost half, to only 1 hour and 42 minutes.
So why would you want to buy a ThinkPad W700ds, when a similarly-equipped desktop with two full-size monitors would cost several thousand dollars less? The ThinkPad provides an opportunity to put the entire desktop experience—full keyboard, Wacom tablet, dual screens, and all—in an (admittedly large) bag and take it with you. Photographers and filmmakers, who are used to lugging heavy equipment with them on-location, won’t even notice the system’s size. Workers who find themselves setting up shop for weeks at a time in different cities will be able to take the W700ds with them, much more easily than the combination of a desktop, keyboard, mouse, tablet, and two monitors.
The ThinkPad W700ds sports a base price of $3,663 but was recently released in Japan at a whooping price of $7,747.
