ThinkPad notebooks - whether IBM or Lenovo branded - have been a firm staple of the business community for almost two decades. Now the manufacturer has announced that 60 million of the laptops have been sold, and is celebrating the achievement by upgrading the venerable T series.
The new models are a refresh of the 14in T410 and T410s and the 15in T510 that will make them the first business-laptops to include NVIDIA's Optimus graphics-switching technology. As far as we can tell, the only discrete GPU on offer is the professional-grade 512MB Quadro NVS 3100m, though this should suit most business users just fine.
What's interesting is that - according to a demo seen by Hot Hardware - Lenovo's implementation of the technology will enable both GPUs to be running simultaneously. The manufacturer's software allows for fine monitoring of the graphics sub-system, and specific programs can be instructed to run on either integrated or discrete hardware. This is in contrast to every other implementation that we've seen, which only allows one of the GPUs to be enabled at a time.
The up-shot of this is that - using the company's Mini Dock Plus - it will be possible to drive three external displays as well as the laptops LCD panel at the same time.
Lenovo also took the opportunity to remind everyone of all of the 'firsts' that the ThinkPad series has achieved. In its long history, the laptops pioneered many now-standard features, including spill-resistant keyboards, built-in CDROM - and later DVDROM - drives, integrated wireless-networking and integrated fingerprint readers. A ThinkPad was even the first modern laptop in space.
The Optimus-enabled notebooks are available from Lenovo's website and are currently retailing at £1056 for the T410, £1656 for the SSD-equipped T410s and £1070 for the T510 including VAT.
