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Dual-headed Laptops
Baloo Ursidae writes "ABC News is reporting that some little upstart in PA is making dual headed laptops. Orient it like a book, you have two portrait-oriented touch sensitive monitors. Orient it like a laptop, and one of the monitors becomes a soft keyboard. Not cheap, however, they start at $4,000." That is absolutely nuts. More power to 'em!
Repost
Dinivin
I looked at building these in 99
problem was a small run cost too much and would only be a 486
Now that tech has cought up and folk can buy parts from all over the place I may go back to my old designs.
More power to these folks. Congrats.
comment directly in my journal
Can they run linux?
Technology is most abused by the very people it was created to help
and your keyboard freezes, how do you press CTRL-ALT-DEL?
philcrissman.com.
Well, despite the negative comments at the head of the Slashdot article, I think that this is actually a good thing. Let more tablet PC alternatives enter the market so we can really test the usability factor of !!!OMG!!! different ways in which we use computers.
I don't think there are many ./'ers who don't agree that market forces are how we weed out what is really good and what really stinks. If the company manufacturing these happens to stumble onto a new idea that changes the way in which we compute, they'll succeed fiscally, and hopefully shift (for the better) the way we use laptops and mobile computers. If, on the other hand, this turns out to be another lead-balloon idea based on the notion that "a fool and his money are soon parted" that will play out as well.
I, for one, am excited to see different form factors for mobile platforms. I admit I'm a compute gadget fan, but that's the only way we can improve the status quo.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
Mentioning Linux to get the Linux sympathizer's mod points!
If you used the superior Windows operating system, you wouldn't have to ask. It runs on *ALL* hardware from my Timex Sinclair 1000 to my NES 8-bit top loader to my shiny new Pentium 4 3GHz machine.
One of the two screens are going to get very dirty after being used as a keyboard for a while.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Here is the requisite link to the company making these: Estari.
I would have liked to see a lot more info on their site. Not much for documentation of other pictures.
comment directly in my journal
Guess we went through the lifetime of laptops being new and fresh! Now it is time to upsize, kingsize, something else size your laptop with dual displays.
If you thought you weren't going to use it before, chances are you aren't going to use it now, but better hurry and get one while supplies last!
Hopefully, the trend will continue onward, and it will bring down the cost of realistic laptop gimmicks.
I need onboard GPS!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
An old slashdot story about dual head laptops
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
There are two uses for this thing. Only one isn't boring.
a) office apps
b) PORN!!!!
Yup, two pornos at once. Make watching porn like reading one of those crappy books on Harry Potter!
Actually, I wish I hadn't just associated Harry Potter with porn, the mental image will make me kill people some day. (runs into forest to plot murders, then comes back after reading this and realising (if the floon is right) planets will do it for him).
I don't know why I just said all that. Neh.
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
...here.
...makes sense to me. Would you suggest the button be called "Stop"? Or should it just have a logo on it like Gnome? Lame-ass.
We're proud to report that A bunch of geeks are running a website with dual-posted stories. Not cheap, however, subscriptions start at $5 for 1000 pages. Coincidentally, this has also been reported as "absolutely nuts", but we've received no reports of anyone wishing more power to the editors of this site.
Amen to that. The only problem I see is that for such a device to be practical to me, it needs an antenna that can be located a few feet from the laptop.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
All we need now is for the cellphone companies to catch on. Replacing the keyboard on the phone with a touchscreen would allow for better input (where the "keyboard" would change depending on what the application needs). And if designed into one of those clamshell phones, the risk of damaging it would be minimal.
;-) )
So, instead of adding an extra display on the outside, place it on the inside (hey, maybe we even can have three screens? Scaaary
Man, I could go for some dual head, on my laptop! (mod me down, that was lame, but i couldnt resist)
REPOST
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
I think that there could be some really cool uses for these!! If i had the money I'd go buy one!!!
Why dont you guys post in a search function for articles that will let you know about possible duplicates.
:)
Hell post the story I posted this morning it's a original
Wow! A keyboard with all of the feel of the famous Atari 400 keyboard!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
if you are after screen area, why waste a lot of it displaying a virtual keyboard? This laptop might be a good candidate for those projection keyboards. I bet you could set up the keyboard so that it's repositionable (or use mirrors) so that you can use it while in "dual-portrait" or "dual-landscape" And (not sure if this is feasible) if you are wanting to eliminate the whole touch-screen concept how about a projection mouse pad as well?
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
neat. I don't want to clean those fingerprints off the keyboard-screen all the time though.
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
- open window
- throw
- close window
Should solve any problem...It seems like this would also reduce your batter life by 2x! Two backlights is much more taxing than one. Perhaps this one'll be the first large roll out of OLEDS also:)
I thought that dual head ment 2 keyboards and dual eye ment 2 monitors. Am I wrong?
How is it that a technology like this gets rave comments on slashdot, but HDTV is scoffed at? I've never been able to understand the Slashdot mentality. It's as if it is mainstream, then it is a waste and uncool, but if something else comes along like this, then it is instantly glorified.
What gives, people?
My Cerberus laptop has three!
Repeal the DMCA!
Just like the post said..."More power to 'em" :-)
Gosh I hope they get that power, they're sure to need it in those laptops
# They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Fran
What about tactility? I would definitively miss the tactility of a mechanical keyboard... I've used touchscreen style keboard before (on kiosks, embedded systems, etc.) and found it difficult to adjust to...
An OPEN mind is a beautiful thing...
Handwriting recognition is still slower and requires more QA editing than keyboard typing.
Touchscreen keyboards are marginal at best.
Not all applications are or can be made "pen aware" just because the PC itself is. If you need an example, try chnging your iPaq or Jornada to Landscape mode and watch how certain functions become lost and irrecoverable off the screen.
This solution certainly provides a different and interesting way of getting information OUT of the laptop, but it does so at a sacrifice to the means and ease of getting it IN.
Until there are new and functional means of accessing the user interface such as effective and accurate speech recognition or 3D gesturing ala "Minority Report", these gizmos just don't offer enough outside of a very few niche applications to qualify as revolutionary.
for a panorama view.
in fact just sell me the display (with the mod i mentioned) so i could use it as an unfolding portable display for my shuttle cube.
I think this thing's pretty cool except for the fact that it would use a touchscreen keyboard in landscape mode. That would be terrible. I don't see any reason that the second panel couldn't have a normal mechanical keyboard on its backside, though.
Not only is this a repost, but the date smack at the top of the ABC News article says Dec 27.
Maybe it should be called Olds for Nerds. Stuff that mattered.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Am I the ony one noticing that there is no mouse on this thing ? Come on really touch screens have there uses but no one really wants to use one for actual work.
Its not where your going but how fast your internet connection is.
I do think this is a novel concept. Several of the posts/replies to this article are mentioning they would miss the mechanical keyboard. I believe this would be best suited for an external USB keyboard and "onscreen touch keyboard" when necessary or travelling.
I think this would be a boom for audio & photo/video professionals. Toolbars on one screen, preview/waveforms on the other, plus onscreen tracing/editting/erasing. If you are a photo/ad pro then you you haven't had value until have tried a Cintiq from Wacom. They are VERY expensive but VERY worth it!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Four times the price and half the runtime. Brilliant. I wish I'd thought of that.
But only on a BLADE server. Get it? Hehe... he... blade. he.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Anyone remember Penny's computer book?
I wonder if this one can unlock doors, remotely drive cars, and perform facial recognition to reveal MAD agents?
XeoMage
When are we going to have lightweight head mounted displays for personal use? No backlighting to worry about, lower power consumption, gigantic resolution, and the best form factor of any laptop - 0. Match it with a pair of data gloves to make a virtual keyboard, and you've got the smallest, most portable keyboard around. How big can these monitors get before we start having to lug around generators on our backs to power the damn things?
I bet one could have some 3D fun with one.
Don't puke, but such a critter would be a perfect platfrom for the Tablet PC concept - I already use my laptop as a portrait-oriented PDF viewer when reviewing docs, 2 pages at once would help tremendously. If both screens were touchscreens, and you could have a small nav bar at the bottom, these could be the interim step to ebooks for corporate documentation untill we get the Digital Ink the MIT media lab goons keep promising....
Of course, i'm prejudiced by the 500+ pages of online docs i have for required reading this semester, but hey....
Imagine a beoblah blah blah...
In Soviet-Russia blahblah...
What is that, some sorta ripoff?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
With this design you could possibly implement a swivel for the dual displays and place a keyboard/mouse combo on the back of one of the LCD monitors...allowing for dual screens, or the more familiar "standard laptop" feel. The problem of screen damage could be easily remeded by a simple cover or raised platform around the displays. To prevent the keyboard from causing unwanted operation, it could be made quite thin so that it would have a low clearance compared with the surronding body (The laptop casing). Or the keyboard could be just disabled when the screen is swiveled, I for one wouldn't really care if the buttons became scratched. This would allow for the most functionality (much faster typing compared to a touchscreen) and perhaps could have solved numerous design problems. As for the potential problem of low battery life with the dual LCDs, solar panels could be embedded into the screens themselves, providing a boosted battery life. Or if technically possible for the manufacturer, a French or even Mexican designed fusion reactor could be...
And X crashes, does the keyboard disappear?
These are touch screen LCDs. Here is a 15" desktop model for the low price of $597. Imagine the costs of making it portable, then doubling it.
Several points for coolness, but minus a few million for stupidity.
You should definitely read this article, The Economics of the Microsoft case, by Tim Bresnahan, who was chief economist (?) for the DOJ during the trial.
Fixing copyright
Dual headed X11 running Enlightenment with the nifty LCARS ETheme. Assuming both screens are touchsensative, and hopefully someone writing an LCARSesque qwerty applet for E, I think they'd really be on to something in looks, or at least the headturning factor. Laptops are cool, but the entire Star Trek look (which most phones have no gotten) hasn't quite made it to them yet. This thing is really REALLY cool.
Already available, I believe: Flip-Pad Voyager from Xentex http://www.xentex.com/home.html
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