First up is this:

The key here is the port on the left, namely Thunderbolt. We expect this to be a big theme of CES 2012, with the weight of the industry moving behind the inevitable successor to USB.

And so it should. To quote Lenovo, Thunderbolt allows you to “transfer a full-length HD move in less than 30 seconds and back up a year of continuous MP3 playback in just over 10 minutes.”

Intel’s Ivy Bridge architecture will also make its debut with the S430, with our Lenovo spokesman making it clear that this would be one of the flagship products at the time of launch.

This helps the 14in S430 to shed some weight and girth compared to the ThinkPad S420, which it replaces. The main stats are “under 4lb” and “less than 20mm thick” according to our insider, which is quite respectable for a machine that includes either a DVD burner or a second hard drive.

The other enhancements are less eye-catching but welcome nonetheless. Keyboard junkies will appreciate the larger cursor keys and what Lenovo claims to be a quieter click. This latter aspect was rather difficult to judge in a crowded hall, but the keyboard itself was enjoyable to type on.

Lenovo also includes a number of technologies to improve speech recognition and voice-over-IP performance, including dual-array microphones and software enhancements.

It adds up to a tasty sounding laptop that should pack decent performance (a separate graphics chip will be included for those after-hours games) and enormous battery life.

As ever, the proof will come when we get a chance to test the S430 in our Labs.

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…

It’s a real beast of a laptop (pictured here with a ThinkPad X301 on top), measuring 53mm thick, 410mm wide and 310mm deep. It weighs a lot: 5kg without the power brick (which itself weighs a shoulder challenging 1kg) is enough to make me glad I ate my spinach last night. And, as with many high end Lenovo and IBM ThinkPads before it, it has a hulking presence more akin to a piece of military hardware than an office-based computer.

That second screen is ingeniously realised. It stows behind the main 1,920 x 1,200 17in panel, but within the lid like some over-fed SD card. Push it in and it pops out, spring-loaded, ready for action.

Push it back in and it simply locks in place. It’s 10.6in in diagonal – larger than most netbook screens – and boasts a resolution of 768 x 1,280 pixels. Handy for shunting palettes onto, for instance, or anything else you care to think of.

That’s the most exciting innovation, but it’s by no means the only one. To add to the extra screen our W700ds also has a graphics tablet built into the wristrest, with a digitiser pen stowed in the right hand edge. And above this is a Pantone colour calibration sensor, which helps you set up the screen for professional, pre-publication work.

Needless to say, the internal specification is impressive too: a 2GHz quad-core Intel Q9000 processor is backed with 4GB of RAM and two 250GB hard disk drives in RAID0 configuration, not to mention the draft-n wireless, TPM and fingerprint reader, trackpoint and touchpad configuration, number pad and full Qwerty keyboard…

Once you’ve caught your breath after absorbing all that, you might just want to take note that we’ll be posting the full review here later in the week, complete with benchmark scores, battery life figures (for what it’s worth), and our official verdict. That’s if we can get the thing back down the stairs without causing ourselves serious bodily harm.

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.  

First impressions are just a tad underwhelming though. Indeed, the trait most reminiscent of the ThinkPad ranges is the build quality: the IdeaPad does feel reassuringly sturdy. And, at 1.13kg, it’s certainly no porker.  

But, if you’re one of those hoping for a shrunken ThinkPad X200 with a £300 price tag, you’re liable to come away more than a little crestfallen. There’s no embedded 3G – something which comes as a major disappointment given that Lenovo have crammed it into all their other laptops. And, apart from the curious choice of a true 16:9 panel with a 1,024 x 576 resolution, there’s precious little to get even slightly excited about. It’s probably best that we don’t mention the dainty 3-cell battery clipped to its rear….

Expect a full review very soon but, going by what we’ve seen so far, we’re not sure the Samsung NC10 will be giving up its crown anytime soon. 

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.