The Lenovo ThinkPad Z60 Series wants just one thing: to blow your hair back.

These notebooks are multimedia monsters with huge, bright screens, booming sound and crisp graphics. The dynamic duo, the Z60m and the Z60t, hit the ground running in September and never looked back, making them the gold winner in our Mobile Products of the Year in the laptop/notebook category.

With built-in Wi-Fi, wireless10, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet, dial-up, three USB ports, digital card reader, headphone and microphone jacks, and an infrared port, these notebooks are ready for business, school or for just plain fun. Throw in a battery upgrade and get 8.5 hours of juice, meaning an entire work day of untethered access.

The Z60t starts at $1,099 and features a 14-inch widescreen, weighs 4.5 pounds and measures 1.1 inches thick with a standard four-cell battery. It has 4.5 hours of battery life, a full size keyboard, an Intel 915GM Express Chipset and an Intel Pentium M or Intel Celeron M processor. The notebook comes in either black or titanium and has PCI express digital integrated graphics, a secure digital card slot and one PC card slot.

The Z60m, which starts at $799, has most of the same features, but boasts a 15.4-inch widescreen, weighs 6.6 pounds and is 1.4 inches thick. It has 6 hours of standard battery life.

What sets the ThinkPad Z60 series apart is ThinkVantage Productivity Center, which lets managers keep the notebooks secure and operating with the press of a button. That blue button opens a menu of applications and tools that include an away manager, which allows time-consuming and power-hungry applications to run automatically while the user is away, or the whisper mode, which lets processor-intensive applications run in slices when multi-tasking is necessary. For the Z60 series, Lenovo coined the tag line "Press a button, walk away."

For security, the Z60 series features fingerprint reading built into the palm rest and single-password sign on. It has tracking and loss-control abilities, EvDO wireless, cell phone access and WWAN access using Verizon's network.

And, just for fun, the models have easy push-button controls to play CDs and DVDs with a touch of a finger.

Andrew Hickey