Lenovo's dual-screen ThinkPad W700ds

Lenovo has been forced to announce the ThinkPad W700ds ahead of the planned CES announcement after a page on the IBM website went live early - and if there's ever been a laptop worthy of being referred to as "the hamburger with the lot", it's this one. The 11 pound monster sports a 17-inch display and a secondary 10.5-inch display that folds out to the right - click through for the laundry list of other features.

Lenovo claims that that the primary display is brighter than any other laptop display on the market, and has a color gamut equivalent of 72% of Adobe RGB which is again superior to any other laptop display.

With your choice of processors from a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo T9400 all the way up to a 2.53GHz Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9300 with 12MB of L2 cache, 4GB of DDR3 and NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M or 3700M graphics, there's no shortage of grunt.

The complete antithesis of Apple's pro laptops, which have just started cutting back on connectivity, the W700ds packs VGA, DisplayPort and Dual Link DVI options for driving external displays, and your choice of smart card reader, CF reader or ExpressCard/54 slot alongside a dedicated ExpressCard/34 slot. And if you can handle making it even heavier, there's room for a second hard drive. Did we mention there's a WACOM digitizer in the palm rest?

The W700ds appears to be as close as you'll get to a portable desktop without actually carrying a desktop around, and we're expecting it to be a big hit for graphic designers, video editors, 3D artists, game developers and many other professionals who need as much screen real estate, connectivity and/or CPU/GPU grunt as they can get, in a machine that can travel with them.

The W700ds is expected in January starting at US$3,600. Don't miss the images.

Story via Engadget, Computerworld and eWeek.