ThinkPad rumor mill, the plot thickens! New L412/L512, ThinkPad W701/W701ds launches 1st March?

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It is now almost certain that the R Series will be re-launched as the L Series in March and will have the Model designation ThinkPad L412 and ThinkPad L512. We first saw the ‘new’ R Series, i.e., the R410 and the R510 on our launch schedule prior to December 09 and wondered how a refreshed R Series would fit in with Lenovo’s emerging markets and SMB strategy.

The new L Series will be aimed squarely at the mainstream corporate market so it will be interesting to see some specification. Its difficult to see how this all fits together with the T Series, the SL Series and the new ThinkPad Edge. And how will the new ThinkPad L Series be priced? Will they fit in between the SL and the T Series?

The ThinkPad T410 starts currently at $999 with an Intel Core i5-520M 2.40GHz Processor and the SL410 currently stars at $499 with an Intel Celeron T3100 1.9GHz Processor so the new ThinkPad L412 has to sit somewhere in between and offer a clearly defined value proposition.

And the exciting news for the power hungry is, the new ThinkPad W701 and ThinkPad W701ds will be available on the US Lenovo Site at least, on the 1st March 2010. We will see amongst other things, i7 Extreme quad-core processors, up to the quad-core Core i7-920XM with 8MB L3 cache, new NVIDIA® Quadro® Graphics and a Multi-touch screen.

One thing is for sure. Whether your a budget minded buyer or a power user, by the end of March 2010, with the release of the new ThinkPad L412/L512 and the new ThinkPad W701 and ThinkPad W701ds the ThinkPad range of notebooks will have something for everybody.