Twin-Screen Vista Laptops

An anonymous reader writes ""Asus has shown off a prototype of the first dual-screen laptop, the W5Fe. These laptops, bearing the Intel codename 'Newport' have a standard screen on the inside plus a smaller, additional colour display on the outside of the lid. The second display is capable of showing video, flight departure information, movie show times, alerts, games, movies, images and MP3s, all while the laptop is switched off. According to CNET, the battery requirement for such a screen is minimal — with standard laptop batteries providing hundreds of hours of use."

Comments

Re:All this while switched off?

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Unless that second display is driven by a second motherboard

If I remember correctly when these were first discussed years ago, that is in fact exactly the case. If memory serves its almost like an onboard PDA included with the laptop. When the laptop is on data is synched between the harddrive and the "pda" boards solidstate memory. I think there are some shared components like networking, etc but for the most part the PC is completely off and the "PDA" type functionalty runs almost completely seperately. Its been awhile so I could be remembering this incorrectly, but thats the basics of what I recall.

We need dual screens on the inside.

[VidEdit]

The second, cell-phone-style screen on the outside is cute, but what would be really useful would be one or two additional laptop screens that would swing out like a two fold restaurant menu. While a triptych screen laptop might be a little heavier and need strong hinges, it would be great for video editing and such...

twin screens... psh

[awrz]

Honestly. Why not have the keyboard be it's own full resolution touch screen. That'd be hot beans. Have it display a digital keyboard... with neat GUI overlays. It' be like the Matrix! :)

Re:Technically dual screen.

[Country_hacker]

Dang it, I've been thinking about this for the last week or so, and now here it shows up on /.

Mainly brought about because my wife and I have only one laptop to share, I considered putting a second LCD display on the back of my laptop's "lid", cutting away the cover so both LCD's could share the same light source. (Okay, so I'm not even sure the light is two-sided, but this is mostly theoretical anyway, I don't have the guts to start performing major surgery on my computer)

The only other question I had was the operating system, are there any variants out there that allow multiple keyboard/mouse/display combinations on the same CPU? Linux is supposed to be multi-user, but I'm talking about plugging in another USB kb/mouse and going from there. Anybody know of anything like that out there, or am I just dreaming?