Maximum PC wacom RSS Feed

Wacom Tablets Finally Get Multi-Touch and Gestures

Paul Lilly — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:30:35 -0500

Good news for anyone who's been eyeing up Wacom's Bamboo line. The tablet maker announced it has added multi-touch and gestures to its Bamboo devices, giving users another dimension beyond the traditional pressure sensitive pen, Wired.com reports.

Three new models were introduced, including the pen only, touch-only, and one that does both. Each one comes with 512 pressure levels in the pen tip, with the active area of the tablets measuring 5.8 x 3.6 inches. The multi-touch and gestures support means users can now navigate, click, double-click, right-click, scroll, select & drag, rotate, zoom, and perform other functions all with finger taps or finger movements.

Both the Touch and Pen models are priced at $70, while the Pen & Touch runs a cool C-note.

Lenovo Thinkpad W700

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:52:20 -0500

Let’s face it, the only real difference between a mobile workstation and gaming notebook has been the sticker and GPU drivers. Lenovo’s ground-breaking W700 changes that with a slew of features that truly make it worthy of being called a workstation notebook. But it’s not just about the W700’s 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme Q9300 quad core or its Quadro FX 3700M with 1GB frame buffer alone.

To us, it’s the integrated Wacom tablet that tells us Lenovo just didn’t take a big-ass gaming notebook and stuff a Quadro in it. It doesn’t hurt that the W700 boasts a 400nit daylight readable screen either. The screen is bright but not as brilliant as the dual-tube displays that Toshiba used to use in its home theater PCs.

The 1920x1200 panel Lenovo uses 72 percent color gamut screen (of Adobe color gamut) which is much higher than previous designs. Most other notebooks can display only about 42 percent of the Adobe color gamut. Only Hewlett-Packard’s upcoming DreamColor panel in the EliteBook 8530p is likely to give the W700 a run for the money in color gamut.

Workstation, does mean “work” though and the W700 is more than capable. We’ve seen comments on our forum where readers questioned if a quad-core was needed in a notebook. In our book, hell yes. Unless, that is, you like sitting around waiting for things to happen. For example, the W700 takes 831 seconds to complete our Premiere Pro CS3 test. The dual-core Gateway P-7811 FX that we reviewed in our October issue takes 2,143 with its 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo. The W700 also takes half the time to spit our HD slideshow using ProShow Producer than the P-7811 FX.

The Quado FX 3700M’s large 1GB frame buffer may make you think that it’s made for gaming, but many content creation apps actually need the large frame buffer more than games. While it’s not intended as a gaming part, it does OK but it won’t outpace the Gateway P-7811 FX gaming notebook and its GeForce 9800N GTS part. We also fired up Crysis and tried to push it at very high at 1920x1200 and the results weren’t pretty. It ran but we wouldn’t play the game that way. It’s better suited for playing Crysis at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 instead. The W700 is more than enough to play Unreal Tournament 3 and is capable of 48 fps at 1920x1200 resolution. So while it’s capable of gaming, it probably doesn’t make sense to buy the W700 if that’s your only purpose. The Gateway P-7811 FX is a better fit and far cheaper.

You’re probably saying that it’s not fair to compare a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo versus a 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme but our experience with desktops tells that even if the dual core was running at 3GHz the quad core would still stomp it good. The short story is that if you care about performance and you use multi-threaded apps (and most content creation apps are today) you need a quad core. To believe anything else is simply wrong.

In amenities, the W700 has almost everything you need – a Gigabit Ethernet port, five USB 2.0 ports, dual-link DVI-D, VGA, DisplayPort and a card reader. An ExpressCard 34 is included a second slot can be added with either a ExpressCard 54, smart card or Compact Flash reader. One thing that’s notably missing: eSATA. That can be run via ExpressCard, of course, but why not include it Lenovo?

We’re also not sure you need to have Windows Vista Ultimate, but that’s what Lenovo configured this box with. Fortunately, it’s the 64-bit version and to take advantage of that, Lenovo installed 4GB of DDR3/1066 DIMMs.

The W700 comes with a 9-cell battery that you gives you just above dismal in runtime. Let’s just say that you won’t finish watching Return Of The King without running for an outlet. That’s without cranking up the quad-core.

In storage, our W700 came configured with a pair of 160GB 7,200 RPM drives in RAID 0. While fast for a notebook, it’s not our top pick. If we needed read speed, we’d run Intel’s new X25-M in one bay and a 500GB drive in the other. If drive speed can be sacrificed for safety, a pair of 500GB drives in RAID 1 would make us feel a whole lot better about our data.

One really nifty feature of the W700 is the built-in HueyPro color calibrator. If you do any serious image editing, video editing or work that must have strict color control, calibration is a must have. With the W700, you fire up the HueyPro applet, hit the start button and close the lid. The W700 beeps when the display is properly calibrated.

Now for what’s going to hang up most people: the size. This sucker looks huge. In some ways, it even looks bigger than those huge Pentium 4-based notebooks that were the rage three years ago. That’s because it is actually a little bigger by about an inch. We compared the W700 to very old Clevo D900T and the W700 is about an inch deeper than the Clevo. The good news is that it’s lighter. As large as the W700, it’s actually only 8.3 lbs. That makes it a two to three pounds lighter than the Clevo D900T notebooks.

If we were to fire up the W700 alongside those old P4 notebooks of yore, the performance differences would be astounding. Ultimately that’s what it comes down to with mobile workstations – performance. And if performance matters to you for your job, we think you should check out the W700.

Hands-on with Lenovo's Monstrous W700 17" ThinkPad -- Photos and Impressions

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:20:39 -0500

When we first walked into our meeting with Lenovo last week, we thought it was an oversized mockup. Sure, it looked like a ThinkPad. But it was huge! We're used to small, slim, no-nonsense ThinkPads; we were unprepared for this. Who would want a 17" ThinkPad?

Once we took a closer look at the just-announced W700, though, we got our answer: We want one. Maybe it's the integrated Wacom digitizer. Or the onboard HueyPro color calibrator. Or maybe we like the idea of a 640GB RAID array in a laptop. Or the 1GB of dedicated graphics memory. This is a big, powerful system, aimed at digital content professionals: photographers, videographers, animators, CAD/CAM engineers, and the like.

Looking closely at the specs, we can see that Lenovo’s not pulling any punches. The W700 will be the first notebook to ship with Intel’s not-so-secret Core 2 Extreme mobile quad-core CPU (officially launching at next week’s Intel Developer’s Conference), and the first with Nvidia’s just-announced Quadro FX3700M GPU, which has 1GB of video memory (Lenovo claims internal testing yielded over 10,000 in 3DMark06). Oh, and they’ll also put in up to 8GB of DDR3 memory.

The onboard HueyPro color calibrator will be especially handy with the professional-quality 1920x1200 WUXGA screen (a 72% Gamut 400 NIT display). To calibrate, you simple activate the program and clamp down the laptop lid – the software does the rest. With such a high end display, Lenovo recommends that users calibrate once a week.

And that integrated Wacom tablet? It’s a sizeable 12cm by 8cm digitizer that’s activated with a magnetic pen that hides in the side of the notebook. You can use it with digital content applications like Photoshop or Illustrator or configure it to map to the entire screen to manipulate your cursor.

The W700 also boasts a 7-in-1 media card reader, integrated camera, 5 USB ports, and plenty of display outputs – Dual Link DVI, VGA, even DisplayPort. Unfortunately, you’ll have to look to the optional port replicator dock for eSATA support (priced at $279).

The whole thing weighs about 8.3lbs, and Lenovo says it’ll get between 2.5 and 3 hours of battery life, which is hardly earth-shattering but a lot better than we’d expect from such a big machine. Placed next to a slim Thinkpad X300, the W700 dwarfs the ultraportable in comparison. We can’t imagine lugging it on business trips across the country, but we could see professionals using it as a desktop replacement at the office and bringing it home to work at night.

Prices will start at about $3K, and the machine will be pretty customizable – you can leave out the Wacom, calibrator, or both, and choose between normal hard drives (up to 320GB each at 5400RPM in RAID, or 200GB each at 7200 RPM) and SSDs (up to 128GB). Expect to pay upwards of five grand for a fully kitted-out notebook.