Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds has us seeing double

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Laptops, I have no doubt you’re tired of hearing, are taking over the world. Slowly but surely over the past decade or so, sales of portable computers have caught up and overtaken sales of desktops to the point at which most ordinary folk wouldn’t even contemplate buying a hulking great desktop machine.

But you still wouldn’t replace a graphics workstation machine with a laptop, would you? Well, if first impressions are anything to go by, you might if you had the chance to swap it for one of Lenovo’s W700ds workstation laptops.

You may have seen it before on various blogs and news websites, including perhaps our very own – it’s the one with two screens (the DS bit stands for dual screen), and understandably we were very keen to get one in.

But nothing quite prepared us for our first meeting with it…

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Just in: Lenovo’s netbook – the IdeaPad S10e

Friday, December 19th, 2008

It’s been a long time coming, but Lenovo’s entry into the netbook fray, the IdeaPad S10e, has finally landed in PC Pro’s labs.

As the name suggests it’s a 10in netbook and – yes, you guessed it – it’s got an Intel Atom N270 inside and 1GB of RAM. So far, so very, very familiar.  

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Admiring bottoms

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Admission number one: the publisher of PC Pro is also the publisher of MacUser. Admission number two: he uses a MacBook Pro. Admission number three: he likes it.

I was admonishing him about this in our local pub the other night, when he came up with what I at first thought was a ridiculous argument – but I’m now starting to believe he might be right.

“The thing is, Tim,” he took a sip of beer to punctuate his point, “the thing is, the bottom of your laptop is ugly. Horribly, horribly ugly. The bottom of my Mac is a thing of beauty.”

And he’s right. I wrested it off him for long enough to take the photo you see before you, and I can’t deny the smooth, unblemished contours. In contrast, take a look at my (otherwise fantastic) ThinkPad X60’s underneath. No other word for it: ugly.

So what can we conclude? That the future is beautiful-bottomed laptops? I think so, but that’s only part of it. The fact is he won’t be buying another laptop unless it looks good from all angles. And it’s not only PC manufacturers who should take note, it’s every manufacturer.