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The World's First Four-Screen Laptop

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the four-is-better-right dept.

Barence writes "Intel has stunned visitors at IDF by showing off the world's first four-screen laptop. The oddly-named 'Tangent Bay' has three miniature touchscreens set horizontally into the case below the main, full-sized panel. It is a fully functional prototype: delegates were able to scroll photos around the touchscreens by swiping with a finger. The idea smacked a little too much of the ill-fated Vista SideShow." Seems strange that they would put the screens above the keyboard. I think embedding an iPhone type touchscreen in place of the trackpad would be a far more useful thing.

9 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Touchscreens... by Jurily · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What's with all the hype about touch screens? And THREE of them? What possible use could the third one serve when no OS I know of plays nicely with even the first one? Do they have fingerprint protection at least?

    Yes, it looks cool, I'll give you that. But so does the 3 megabytes of xorg.conf to make them work properly, and you still don't get application support.

    1. Re:Touchscreens... by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, it looks cool, I'll give you that. But so does the 3 megabytes of xorg.conf to make them work properly, and you still don't get application support.

      You could try using a windowing system where you don't need to fart around with things like xorg.conf.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    2. Re:Touchscreens... by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Clearly it depends on the implementation, but...

      Each subscreen could act as a mini-desktop so that you could "minimize" an application like a browser or video to a smaller screen and still run your main app full screen in the large LCD while keeping an eye on other apps. You'd be able to run multiple apps without losing any screen real estate. Likewise, a quick tap could bring the application to the main screen and minimize the other app to an open subscreen. This could be implemented in the OS and wouldn't need any special programming on the application side.

      Just one idea.

  2. Meh by klui · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It would have been more stunning if it were 4 full sized screens.

  3. not very creative by johnmark76 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm not sure why they didn't use a screen for the mouse pad like the iphone. Then at least you could make the touchpad extremely useful. I remember there was a rumor (never came true) that the macbook pros were going to do this.

  4. Re:Why don't they... by Nadaka · · Score: 2, Insightful

    http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/

    http://www.techrevision.com/2007/06/13/lcd_keyboard

  5. Re:Useful by Hijacked+Public · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The main thing I use it for is the cpu/ram meters.

    Serious question. Not trying to troll or whatever else.

    What do you do with your computer that makes CPU/RAM meters something you look at often?

    I ask this because I was searching for a theme to dim Snow Leopard and I kept running across these very busy desktops with all sorts of meters and such on them. I do a whole bunch of Photoshop, and a lot of video editing, so my computers tend to be well stocked with CPU and RAM, which I did specifically because I don't want to have to pay attention to the machine's resources.

    Most of the kids on /wg/ have all that Rainmeter stuff for geek bling purposes I'm sure, but I'm wondering what the actual useful applications might be.

    --
    "Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
  6. WTF, those tiny LCDs count as screens? by Locutus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    come on now, "the world's first four-screen laptop", really? Those 3 little touchscreens are so small, I had to look at the pictures a 2nd time to see where the screens were because I was looking at the one large one we think about when we talk about a laptop screen. So then my old Thinkpad was a dual screen because there was a tiny LCD above the keyboard?

    LoB

    --
    "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
  7. Re:Useful by kimvette · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Re: What do you do with your computer that makes CPU/RAM meters something you look at often?

    Easy: if you're in a development environment, developers, QA, and release engineering types would all find that useful.

    --
    The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50