Homepage
Forum
Drivers
HMM
MTM
Feed
Build quality
Nothing much to report here; solid like my T42p. Some minor body flex with substantial pressure. You can tell the stiffness is inside and there's a plastic shell around it. There are places where the plastic shell deflects slightly before hitting the internal skeleton. Lid flex, despite the extra inches, is about equal to all the Thinkpads I've owned in the past. Every thing assembles and disassembles cleanly. There's blue threadlock on every screw.
In short, it feels like a ThinkPad with the i's dotted and the t's crossed. I wouldn't hesitate to pick it up by any corner when opened though that's easier said than done; I don't think I actually *can*.
At work, we're using some perfectly awful Acer 17" 'mobile workstations' that just ooze 'cheap'. You rest your hands on them and they sag and creak. You have to push down on both corners of the lid to latch them closed, etc. The W701 feels like a block of steel compared to it.
Also, unlike the pretty but easily dented/scratched/bent aluminum macs, this thing will still look solid and badass in ten years.
Size
It's got to be said-- this thing is awkwardly large. The screen size may only be 17", but it's proportioned more like a 19-20" notebook. I bought two carry bags; one sold by Lenovo for '17" notebooks' and another for '17" and larger notebooks' and the W701 doesn't even come close to fitting in either.
My T42p, the biggest and baddest of all Thinkpads when I bought it, weighs 6.15 lbs, the W701 weighs 8.60 lbs. The 230W power brick is another 2.1 lbs. One review I'd read earlier starts by mentioning the power brick alone weighs more than six iPhones, two HDV camcorders, or Sony X505 notebook. It is in fact large (pictured above resting on the T42p).
The thing about it that actually feels weird is not that it is big, but that it's proportioned as if it was smaller. It really does seem like my T42p was simply loaded into Photoshop and scaled up by 20% except for the keyboard.
This leads to the first minor issue; the T42p is a good thickness for typing on. The extra 1/4" of thickness and 3/4" further back the keyboard is on the W701 makes typing on a standard 28" desk surface awkward. I have to sit higher, or hold my shoulders up to avoid typing with my wrists bent.
Keyboard
Much sadness! Despite the PSREF only listing the old, stiff-backed keyboards, my W701 arrived with the thin, springy 'full of holes' keyboard common to all the new models. Popping the keyboard off for inspection, it's clear there's a stiffener frame under it. Despite the stiffener, there's still more flex than on my T42p, The keyboard does't sit quite flush against the frame, so some locations are noisy (the left trackpad button has a loud 'clock' when pressed).
Oh well. That's what eBay is for. I have a verified old solid-backed replacment on the way. The bigger issue may just be that it needs to be more solidly mounted into place so that the case around it actually holds it solidly to the frame.
Stylus well
All the reviews I've seen of the W700 and early W701 complained about the Wacom stylus being hard to get in and out. I haven't had any trouble with it at all. Stows cleanly with a solid click, pops out without fuss.
Speakers
Much maligned, and I don't actually see why. They don't and can't compare to external speakers. They're a step up from the speakers on any notebook I've owned. I'd take them over the sound from my wife's 17" Macbook Pro, or my older Thinkpads, or the PowerBook Titanium I owned in a moment of weakness a decade or so back.
Fan / Heat
The fans are both very quiet compared to my T42p. When either fan is idling, it is inaudible at normal sitting distance in a quiet house at night. I have to put my hand over the vent to feel if warm air is coming out.
This is an 820M model with the FX2800, so not the hottest possible options. In both Linux and Win 7, the processor fan does not appear to run at all when the machine is idling. It also consistently turns off once the machine returns to idle.
For comparison purposes, the fan in my T42p (2.1GHz Pentium M) runs continuously, even when idling. The W701's fan is a lower pitched sound than the T42p and obviously never runs as fast. The W701 under load with all four cores running flat out is about as loud as the T42p idling, but lower pitched. The bottom of the machine becomes mildly warm.
The GPU fan tends not to run when Windows is idling, and runs at the lowest setting when Linux is idling (the Linux drivers are brand new and acknowledged to have lousy power-saving as yet).
In short-- cooling appears to be on the wonderful side of overkill.
Screen
Oddly small for the notebook, if you can call a 17" screen small. It somehow harkens back to the early ThinkPads when the screens, as big as they were for the time, didn't fill the lid. It has a very 700C feel to it. If Lenovo had gone 4:3, they could have fit a full 19" panel in the existing lid.
The screen is bright and sharp, no dead pixels (you'd think that wouldn't be a worry anymore, but just last month at work I opened up a new batch of notebooks from a competing cheaper brand and several had bad pixels).
With both backlights cranked, 'black' on the W701 is slightly lighter than black on the T42p FlexView panel. The Flexview is nowhere as bright when white. The W701's black is slightly blue-green. The Flexview's black is slightly blue. The W701 screen is clearly much higher contrast.
Near-black levels do not appear to be spacially dithered at all. Just as good as the S-IPS FlexView here.
Smooth gradients are excellent for an 8-bit screen, even after calibration. You have to look very hard to see any banding at all. On gradients, the screen is noticably superior to the S-IPS FlexView.
The W701 has some minor high-frequency dither, less than on other panels I've considered to be excellent. The panel appears to be completely immune to pixel-walk/dither flicker as tested using the lagom.nl test patterns. Again, every bit as solid as the FlexView.
There is no power supply whine or backlight flicker at any brightness level. The backlight does not appear to be dimmed by pulsing, of if it is, it's a high enough frequency I can't detect it at all. My HDV vidcam also does not show any flicker when recording the screen.
That said, the TN screen has the standard TN viewing angle weaknessses. While good for a TN screen it cannot compare to the FlexView. The screen shifts toward red at the top/right and toward green at the bottom/left. Though far worse than S-IPS in this regard and easy to detect, the shift is not egregious.
Without calibration, the color temperature wanders noticably with luma like on most wide-gamut TN screens (greys are too blue, white is too orange and overdriven). Calibration effectively and completely eliminates the issue. The one thing I'd always loved about FlexView was that grey was dead accurate grey; not blue-gray, not yellow-gray, just gray, regardless of 10% or 90%. Color calibration 95% achieves that on the TN.
The last thing worth commenting on is the RGB LED backlight. I notice it. You can tell it's being edge-lit from the bottom as the component colors are not perfectly mixed there. About the bottom inch of the screen has a slight 'here's where a red LED is, here's where a green is, etc' pattern. I only notice it if the background is set to full white, and I possibly spotted it only because I work with RGB LED lighting, and I know how freaking hard it is to get a perfect diffuse white out of of discrete, widely spaced color LEDs. It is subtle enough I can't
actually get a picture of it.
The other odd aspect of the RGB backlight is that you can tell it's not a phosphor-- it is pumping three hard, pure colors. I wear glasses and the chromatic aberration is more jarring with the RGB light source. On a phosphor screen, you get a soft reddish tint or soft bluish tint on edges when not looking ahead through the center of the glasses. With an RGB backlight, you get perfect colored edges.
I missed the first part of that, but I can read in-between the lines, 
I was veeeery tempted, then tempted by the cheap ES chips on eBay, then saw several careful comparisons that indicated the ES chips were not as good as the release versions (the binning was too aggressive, and they're not stable at normal Tj) and then decided I'd be first in line for a 940XM in Q3 