Review: Lenovo ThinkPad W700

Six iPhones. Two high-def Sony camcorders. The Sony X505 laptop.

These are a few things that weigh less than the power brick for the Lenovo ThinkPad W700, the most massive laptop Lenovo's ever made and, outside of the rarified world of ultra-loaded gaming notebooks, possibly the largest and most expensive laptop on the market.

To call the W700 big is an understatement of epic proportions. This over-nine-pound monster is loaded in every way you can imagine and a few you probably can't. Two laptop "firsts" are already making waves. For starters you'll find a stylus secreted in the base of the W700: This is not for use on the LCD — the W700 is not a tablet PC — but for a pint-sized Wacom digitizer that has been added next to the mouse pad. The digitizer works like a drawing tablet, an absolute-positioning system that lets you draw freehand instead of pushing a cursor around with your finger.

Feature #2 is built-in color calibration. A sensor about the size of a fingerprint reader resides above said digitizer, and software is pre-installed to quickly adjust the color settings of the LCD to photo-grade standards. Just start the software, close the lid, and wait for the chirp. Settings are tweaked automatically, and the before vs. after images are striking in the effect the calibration has.

Though groundbreaking, these two features actually don't much impact the price of the W700, adding just $150 to a laptop that costs — wait for it — $4,473. (That's the price tag for our review unit. You can drive the price up higher with pricier components if you wish.) It's all those other specs that add to the price tag: A gorgeous LCD that's by far the brightest 17-inch model we've ever tested. Core 2 Duo CPU running at a blistering 2.8GHz. 4GB of RAM (and 64-bit Vista installed, so you can actually access it all). Dual hard drives (though our unit had relatively small 160GB drives installed). And finally, an Nvidia Quatro FX 3700M graphics card with 1GB of video RAM. All this goodness powers the W700 to record-setting benchmarks, blowing away all comers at general apps (though not quite offering the highest gaming scores we've seen).

The stratospheric price tag ensures the W700 will likely only find a home in the high-test worlds of CAD, 3D imaging, and professional photo editing. The rest of us will simply have to appreciate the thing from afar... and wait for its features to trickle down to cheaper, smaller machines.