Lenovo gets innovative, shocka

LENOVO IS NEVER accused of making bad products, the firm just tends to fit into a stereotypical business mold. At CES, they are aiming to break that mold with a bunch of innovative products.

The first of these is a fairly stylish all in one PC called the Ideacentre A. The basic specs are nothing radical, a 20.5-inch screen, a wireless keyboard with mouse pad and fairly normal PC internals. That is where normal stops though.

The odd starts with the remote control. It is a Nintendo Wii like motion sensing remote control/mouse, not just a TV remote. From there, it has a speaker and microphone for VOIP, so you never have to leave the couch. Include a few Wii Sports clone games, and you get the idea.

The Ideacentre A will have a range of options, mainly just CPU, memory and HD size - think Imac type SKUs. They will start at around $999 and sadly only come with the broken OS.

The next one isn't really all that new, but it is innovative. The Thinkpad W700ds, once again, like Nintendo, the DS stands for dual screen. At least we know what console is in the break room at the Lenovo design centre. The main screen is a 17-inch 1920 * 1200, and the secondary is 10.6 inches.

It has a Wacom tablet on the keyboard and sports up to 8GB and a quad core Exxxtreme Intel CPU. If that isn't enough, you can get it with dual RAIDed drives and an Quadro GPU, but no word if it is a good or defective one. It is a real mobile workstation.

The W700ds also costs what a workstation does, think starting above $3600 for a stripper, and going way up from there. If you can afford it, you probably want to know if it is a good laptop. The short answer there is that the W700ds is not something you want to carry around.

The raw specs are that it is huge, a 17-inch laptop that is very thick and heavy even for those beasts. For what it gets you, it isn't bad, but lugging this through an airport is a very harsh punishment for misbehaving workers. It weighs in at about 11 pounds, and did we mention that it is very thick? Both are excusable because of the the functionality, but when you first see it, you will be amazed at how thick the lid is.

In the end, the ds is a niche product that has about zero chance of becoming mainstream. If you need the extra screen for CAD or GIMP, you will love this thing. Everyone else, save your back and get a T Series laptop, you won't regret that at the chiropractor in a few weeks. µ