Lenovo w700 DS a Bust
Lenovo stopped the presses and made head line news when they revealed to the world their latest innovation, a dual screen laptop, the Lenovo w700 DS. Too bad it sucks! A considerable desktop replacement, the latest reinvention of the w700 weighs about ten pounds and the new extra screen adds about 0.4 inches to its already monstrous width. The w700 DS adds on another screen that is 10.6 inches to the 17 inches of space the user has. It is really cool how it is spring loaded. All you have to do is push it and it will pop out. Too bad though that there are no hinges on the new screen so that the user can tilt or move the screen at a certain angle.
The w700 DS pretty much has the same specifications of its parent: NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M graphics card, 8 Gb or RAM, availability of using two hard drives at once in a RAID array, although I’m certain that the w700 allows up to three HDDs to be used together. It has the Blu-Ray option which is a good thing, it still has that digitizer pad, and the colour correction thing which is pretty useless to everyone not into digital media.
At first glance the new desktop replacement looks pretty cool but the new screen is too small to really make life more efficient. It is a neat thing to have on the road but having a 10.6 inch monitor does not really do justice, well maybe if the user watches a movie while they do work or uses the screen for side by side comparisons of pictures but for side by side comparisons, that extra 10.6 inches can only go so far. What is worse is the fact that you have to pay $500 more for an extra two pounds of weight. That extra 10.6 inches costs A LOT of money. It’s a great piece of technology, don’t get me wrong. Lenovo is the first company to present a dual screen laptop or in this case a replacement desktop and it looks really cool too. They had to ship this out and present their idea to everyone to get a head start on the competition who no doubt have plans and are working on dual screen laptops as we speak. Unfortunately, the 10.6 inches is not the icing on the cake for this laptop and even if they come out with a bigger screen in the next two years it still will not matter. Let’s just wait until companies are able to get full dual screen capabilities from a single laptop and then we’ll start talking. Imagine having the capability to pull out another 17 inch screen right beside you, that will be amazing. Then the ability to pull out a second screen to your left and a third screen on top. FOUR screens in total. That is a lot of work space and for sure that will be a big ass laptop. Well actually that won’t happen as after having two extra screens they’ll just leave the third extra one out so the desktops actually have a chance.
