LENOVO HAS ANNOUNCED new touchscreen laptops, including the ThinkPad T 400s, which is the company's first laptop to support four-finger multi-touch input.

Until now many laptop makers, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell, were offering touchscreen laptops with two-finger touch input.

Lenovo said ThinkPad T 400s will allow manipulation of images using up to four fingers on the laptop. Multiple fingers can be used instead of mice to zoom into maps, or to scroll through documents.

The four-finger touch input capability could be useful to manipulate objects like images in engineering and design applications, which have more edges and require higher levels of precision, Lenovo officials said.

Touch capabilities allow users to be more productive by serving as a mouse replacement, said Mika Majapuro, worldwide ThinkPad product marketing manager at Lenovo.