Lenovo ThinkPad puts a drawing tablet in a 17-inch laptop

Why didn't someone think of this before? Lenovo's new ThinkPad W700 is a 17-inch laptop with a second input area: A stylus-driven drawing tablet right next to the touchpad.

In addition to being the largest laptop in the ThinkPad line, it's fully loaded with all the features any graphics pro would likely need: Extra-bright WUXGA screen, up to 8GB of RAM, a 1GB Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M video card, and dual hard drives. The Core 2 Extreme CPU runs at a blistering 3GHz, and copious input/output options are also available for your hookup pleasure. Pricing ain't gonna be cheap, starting at three grand.

Love the specs, but the palmrest digitizer is what has everyone's eyes popping out. Tablet PCs (where you can write on the screen directly) are nothing new, but putting a high-res drawing tablet into the palm rest is a real innovation. Such a configuration allows for a more natural drawing surface without having to collapse your machine down (you try drawing on something vertical and bouncy like an LCD screen, placed a few feet away from you) while still giving you access to the keyboard (essential for PhotoShop jockeys). As well, these types of digitizers are generally much better at tracking pen strokes than tablet PC screens, so artists should be able to get much better reproductions on the W700 than they would with a touchscreen setup, despite the smaller size of the drawing surface on the W700. (Lenovo didn't announce the size of the tablet, but it appears to be about 4 x 6 inches based on photographs.)

And there's even a built-in color calibrator option so artists can ensure red stays red from screen to print. Availability begins in September.

Now, if Lenovo can somehow get this thing to run MacOS, it'll be a perfect machine for anyone involved in the digital graphics business. Uh, wait a sec...

MORE PHOTOS: Gizmodo (thanks for the pic above)

LINK: Full Lenovo press release