Lenovo announced today it newest product, the ThinkPad W700 which will be available starting with early September. The upcoming release represents the company’s first 17-inch system and through its features, it targets a certain public, composed of artists, designers, visual editors and other users with similar activities.

The screen offers a 1920x1200 display and a 72 percent NTSC color gamut, in addition to its built-in color calibrator which ensures a better image quality, closer to its true colors, that provides great support for printing and other color-accurate demanding activities.

The basic W700 model sells for $2,949 and includes a 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 Giga Bytes of DDR3 memory, a 1440x900 display and a 160 GB hard drive.

The company offers an optional 3.06GHz Core 2 Extreme dual-core processor, a 8GB memory ceiling, and also two hard drive bays allowing users to choose either a RAID 0 stripe for speed or a RAID 1 mirror for backups. The notebook is equipped with NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 2700M or 3700M video, which help with faster 3D applications and through the Dual Link DVI-D connections also provide the needed resources to handle 30-inch external displays.

The ThinkPad W700 also offers VGA, DisplayPort and an optional Blu-Ray burner drive.

Lenovo’s offer is expected to provide direct and tough competition to Apple’s MacBook Pro, which is also rumored to be expecting an upgrade in the near future. The battle between the two will probably lead to new updates, new features and new prices over the next several months, as each company is looking to secure its market position.