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Flip-Pad Voyager: Dual-screen Laptop
deitrahs writes "I came across this, and wept with joy. It's an Athlon-based, dual-head laptop. Yes, that's right - dual-head LAPTOP. Dual 13.3" displays. And it folds up like an old-school Transformer. Now I just need to find a buyer for this spare kidney so I can afford it - $5 thousand - but the expressions on people's faces at LAN parties will be OH so worth it."
Now you can run your batteries down twice as fast
First mobile Matrox Parhelia based laptop with two extra fold out screens for 3 head surround video!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It's an Athlon-based, dual-head laptop. Yes, that's right - dual-head LAPTOP.
Uhh, at 6kg (13.23 lbs), I think I might come up with better term to describe it.
-Sean
"...but the expressions on people's faces at LAN parties will be OH so worth it."
I have a dual monitor setup at home, and I play Quake a lot with it, but I haven't been able to make much use of the second screen in that game. (I do like being able to see what time it is, though.. heh.)
Does anybody know of any 'dual-head' mods for either Quake or any other FPS game that uses the second screen for anything? I'd *LOVE* if the left screen was the front view and the right screen was the rear view!! Or maybe stats? I dunno...
Just curious if anybody using dual-head has done anything interesting with it in relation to lan-party style games.
"Derp de derp."
Seriously, why? Looks like the page orientation is a throw-back to the old Radius monitors, but too small to be of much good for graphic design. Also, laptops tend to have the very low-end of graphic card support, so I wouldn't expect it's much good for LAN parties, unless you're still playing NSNIPES.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Seems to Be /.ed 4 FTLkC: www.xentex.com/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Google Cache Link
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:v1jL4n
Not as Impressive as I thought. it still seems to be pretty close to standard monitors
Cool, now I can watch a full screen movie and pretend to do actual work while on a plane... Bet the guy in the next seat will be impressed, and in the end isnt that all the matters?
You mean like the Star Trek reruns?
/. was discussing ternary computing, and how since binary digits are bits, ternary digits should be called ...
I like Star Trek too, but c'mon, that's a lame name.
Let's see... the feature of this laptop is that it has two monitors, monitors are something we're always looking at...
What's a good name for two of something we're always looking at? I'm reminded of when
And who on Voyager had the best set of tits? Seven of nine!
And what's seven minus nine?
I think I make my point.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
The lead scientist for this project was the same guy who created monkies with two asses?
OTOH:
- Total screen resolution is 1536x1024, my Dell Inspiron 8000 is 1600x1200 (albeit probably nicer on a larger canvas I suppose)
- That second screen looks a little fragile to me.
- The whole thing seems *BULKY* to me (my Dell is as big as I would want to get).
- No 3D chipset support at all, 8MB VGA (a little tight there!)
- That price tag.
- All new drivers that Linux won't support for a while
Novel idea, but with some serious drawbacks and a high pricetag, I think I'll be sticking with my current Linux laptop for a while longer...I noticed that the mouse touch pad is on the right side. That's gonna be a PITA for south paws unless they have a left-handed version.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
EnkiduEOT
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
You need to get out more. And becareful, you see that hot, bright yellow disk in the sky? We call it the sun. Don't look at it and don't stay out in it too long.
When the mainstream manufacturers start making these - THEN get ready for a drop in price, until then...
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
...or was anyone else expecting to see a laptop that had two *FULL*-sized displays that folded out of it? This is really disapointing.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Matrox used Quake 3 based games to show off their Parhelia 3 display feature. Something about the POV option, which causes the display to be spread out over multiple screens (increasing you're range of vision, not stretching the image). If I wasn't at work I'd look it up for you... might want to check Google and Matrox's site. :)
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Slashdot in effect y'all.
Being completely ignorant and all, I'll post some questions.
$5000? What's the justification for that? I know laptop screens ain't cheap, but are the mechanics behind it so complicated that it has to be double the normal price?
How sturdy does this thing look, I wouldn't want one if it's going to fall apart in a month. Also how easy is it to open and close, a second screen is a wonderful feature (everyone should work on a two-monitor setup just once, you won't want to give it up) but it might not be worth extra weight, shorter battery life, more moving parts, and tedious open and close procedure. One of the great things about a laptop is, you can generally shut it off and stick it in your bookbag (or whatever) in about 10 seconds.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I love running multiple screens on my desktop machine, though. I had 3-20" Trins on my G3 for a long time. Great for flight sims.
Reminds me of a great trick I played on one of my coworkers... we were required to run a wintel machine on our desks just to access company email--something I could have done with VPC, but nobody would listen to me that I didn't want this ugly hunk of crap in my office, and could do without it.
So one late night, I hooked the PC screen up to my G4, transferred all the files over to VPC, and made sure the network connection was happy. Then, of course, all I had to do was set up VPC so it was running on the PC monitor.
To all appearances, both machines were now hooked up and running normally. (though it was somewhat quieter than before!)
Several days pass. No one notices that I'm only using one keyboard and mouse rather than two. Eventually, a Mac-curious coworker stops by for a chat. He asks how hard it is to move files over from PC to Mac and vice versa. Without skipping a beat, I grab a few files from the Mac desktop, and drag them over to the VPC screen. They copy flawlessly (of course). I showed him how you can move the mouse from one screen to another. His jaw dropped.
I said I had wireless networking between the two machines.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Spec page here:
http://www.xentex.com/voyager/techspecs.html
note the resolution specs
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I just spoke to my good friend who just happened to write all the video software for this laptop (in addition to many other company duties) and he told me that the resolution PER SCREEN is 1024 Vertically x 768 Across.
Other sweet gossip he told me was that they're working on one with a really nice dual head 3D card suitable for gaming and what-not and various other improvements.
You all should send your questions and gripes to him directly. His name is Matthew ... now put an @xentex.com after that. (I wrote his email address out like this to prevent spam bots from picking his address up. He's really a cool guy totally devoted to this awesome computer ... it's really a cool thing to see in person. Plus, ask him whatever you want ... he'd certainly fit in here if he wasn't actually doing stuff for his company all day and night.
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
I put up a couple of images from the site here:
Small animated GIF of how it moves
Big pic of the unit unfolded
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
From what I could see the usual benefits of multi-head aren't there or intended. The intent is to have a larger screen yet fold into something the size of a small laptop. You cannot change the swivel of each display while in use, so acheiving the surround effect won't be happening. Each display on it's own is pretty small, so having multiple desktops would not be very useful. In fact, I'm not so sure that the video card would report these two displays as separate monitors, they may be transparently represented as one to the graphics card, an LCD which just happens to have a clean split down the middle.
What we have here is something that aims to have very small folded profile while having a large unfolded profile. The weight and power consumption (and price) make it a bad choice for an everyday portable. The end result is just a display with an ugly separation in the middle, not a flexible multi-head system.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Two little screens are really not anywhere near as good as one big one.
Note, however, that after the thing is opened up one of them can be spun around to face the opposite way. Slave the two together and run a powerpoint presentation on it and you don't need a projector to hold a small meeting.
Salesmen will LOVE this.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But the Geforce4 MX/Go is basically a GF2 pumped up to higher clock and RAM speeds. It doesn't even implement a full DX8 feature set. The GF4 Titanium models are the ones with a new chipset. That said, the Nvidia mobile line finally is bringing decent graphics to the mobile market. If you can get past the blurriness of an LCD (which isn't that bad), you can finally play games on your laptop. Still, don't fool yourself into thinking it's better than your desktop system. Certain sacrifices must be made to keep power consumption and heat output to a minimum; these are not conducive to a super-high-performance GPU.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Or instead, get them a 15" TFT for £300 (or $400, whatever). Plug into VGA out on laptop. Problem solved, without forking out $5000.
You miss the point.
It's worth an extra two grand (5 grand fancy laptop - (2 grand non-fancy laptop with 1 grand spare display)) to have it in one pretty package and impress the customer with how slick you are. Not to mention the attract-the-nerds value. Helps them control the discussion and lead the customer's mind into saying yes.
You make it back in the first sale, with interest, then keep making it back over and over.
Read _Winning Through Intimidation_ for more.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way