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Dual Screen Notebooks - The Wide, Wide Wave of the Future?

Posted by Daniel Shain

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Though it has been a long road, buzz about dual screen notebooks of various sizes is beginning to increase. Frankly, it's pretty cool and darned expensive. But is this feature useful enough that those of us with wide eyes and thin wallets will one day see drop into the everyday consumer level, or is this just another novelty act?

Lenovo W700ds

It all started last year with the Lenovo W700ds. That notebook was based off the original W700, a roughly $3000 (to start) clunker that was aimed at designers who wanted a premium display. This model (ds referring to dual screens) would have a secondary 10.6" display which could slide out from behind the standard 17" display. The idea was that people using Photoshop could put their palettes, etc. on the small screen while they worked on the larger one. The extra display added around $600 to the price of the notebook.

GScreen Spacebook

Laptopmag recently featured a roundup of some of the recent new entries. First, the futuristic (if it was the 1960s) sounding dual screen notebook, the gScreen Spacebook. The Spacebook is supposed to feature dual 15.4" displays on an 8.7lb frame, which is heavy but hardly excessive when you figure you're getting an extra screen. It's been reported that they wanted to begin selling the laptop by this December for prices around $3000, but it doesn't sound like there's been very much in the way of confirmation. More recently, a dual screen beauty of a netbook from Kohjinsha was spotted at CEATEC (pictured above). It featured a swiveling dual screen display of 10.1" screens which can hit resolutions of either 1024 x 600 or 1366 x 768. The specs seem pretty decent, and the final weight of under 4lbs seems phenomenal. Unfortunately, the makers aren't even at the point where they can speculate on price or availability, so we'll just have to wait. It's probably safe to say it'll be south of $3000, but I would expect it to cost easily more than twice as much as a standard netbook.

Dual screens coming to netbooks (while keeping them still light enough to be actually portable) is exciting because it means the price point is coming down, and the massive netbook market might get a look at it and help this idea take off. It's one thing to take the 17", nearly 12lb, $3600 W700ds and shrink it to a 15.4", nearly 9lb, $3000 Spacebook... but another thing altogether to make the dual screens 10.1" and keep the weight under 4lbs. Another interesting trend is this - the W700ds packed intense features, including Quad-Core Extreme processors and up to 8GB RAM (this would raise the price of course). The Spacebook claims to feature some top notch Intel Core 2 Duo stuff and up to 4GB RAM. Kohjinsha's offering will feature an AMD Athlon MV-40 CPU, which can handle HD, but is still just 1.6GHz.

Seeing dual screens slide down to more and more affordable features gives me hope that this will catch on bigtime. The risk, of course, is that it really is only useful for extremely demanding fields where space and processing is a premium, and that the average user simply won't shell out more just for a second screen. Even if that's the case, the trend is still on the upswing, so I'm looking forward to more sweet prototypes in the months to come.

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