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A Dual-Screen 10.1" Laptop In Time For the Holidays
JoshuaInNippon writes "Japanese computer manufacture Kohjinsha has announced that it will begin selling a 10.1" dual-screen laptop on Dec. 11 — in Japan only. While it is not the first dual-screen laptop, a title claimed by the monstrous 17" Lenovo Thinkpad W700ds series, the Kohjinsha sure looks much more portable and stylish. The Thinkpad's extra screen pulls out slightly from one side for about a 40% increase on its display, whereas on the Kohjinsha's two full separate screens spread out symmetrically from the center. While specs are admittedly lower than the Thinkpad, the DZ series certainly wins on cost. The starting price will be ¥79,800, about $900, in Japan (exporters will likely mark that price up slightly), compared with the Thinkpad at well over $2,000. Kohjinsha says the laptop is great for working on 'large business documents' (e.g. excessively wide spreadsheets), or watching videos while surfing the Web, which is likely what most users will be doing with it. The timing and the price certainly make the Kohjinsha DZ series a tempting toy idea for holiday giving — perhaps to oneself."
While I obviously understand not every product is tailored to my needs, I can't really see much of a need for this. The netbook level tech specs likely mean doing more than one thing at once would be painful. Plus, if you actually need a lot of screen real estate, you could likely get a larger laptop with more pixels (and more power under the hood) for around the same money.
Anyone around here think they would want one? Actually curious to hear about the appeal.
I can remember when IBM first tried this trick, but with the keyboard instead of the screen.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Sorry for the mildly off-topic post, but wow! I wonder what kind of battery life that beast gets? Does it have a portable nuclear reactor on board or is the battery reduced to being useful only for trips across the room to switch outlets?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I only find that dual screens are useful in two situations:
1) When you have an app that needs a whole screen to work. A video editor would be an example. They often wish to use a dedicated screen as a preview screen. As such you want a second monitor to dedicate to that, regardless of size of your first one.
2) When you need more screen real estate than you can get in a single monitor, or for a cheaper price than large single monitors. This is by far the most common. You want more room, but a 30" screen is too much money so you get 2 22" or 24" screens instead. The whole reason is more room.
Ya well, in this case a larger laptop, or external screen (or both) would seem to be the way to go. I'm not seeing the second monitor as useful.
There's also the fact that the divide is right down the center. In dual monitor setups I've encountered (including mine at work) one monitor is directly in front of the user and is the primary screen, the other is off to the side and contains the less important stuff. I've never seen one where both monitors were in front and the split was centered. That would be very noticeable and very annoying.
To me, this looks like nothing more than a gimmick.
Specs are 1.6ghz AMD, 1gb ram, 160gb hd, ATI 3200, so it's barely more than a Acer Aspire One with a second 10" screen
I have a Gateway LT3103u and an Acer Aspire One D250-1165 and the Gateway beats the pants off the Aspire... with a 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 L110. Now we're talking about an even-more-capable K8 core at an even-higher clock rate and you want to compare it on a clock-for-clock basis with an Atom processor? I thought we were done with that nonsense some time ago.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The screens are still limited to 600 pixels vertically. Use the ones from the 11.6" version, at 1366x768 each, and I'll be buying one.
I stopped carrying around a 14" notebook because it was just too much to carry around everywhere. A 9" netbook fits the need much better. After playing with someone else's 11.6", I was struck by how much more useful the 1366x768 screen is over a 1024x600 screen (the full-size keyboard doesn't hurt either). If I could have two such screens, which fold up for convenient carrying, I would be all over this.
I have to imagine this will be thicker than a typical netbook, but I could deal with that if the other dimensions do not change.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
All Lenovo laptops are made in China, and the Kohjinsha laptop is made in Japan. How can a Japanese product be cheaper than a Chinese product, given that the cost of labor in Japan is much higher than the cost of labor in China?
The Kohjinsha product is the 2nd instance of such unusual pricing.
In 2008, a quick scan at Frys (the local electronics store) shows that all Fujitsu laptops are made in Japan. Most Sony laptops are made in China. (Only Sony laptops costing more than $2200 are made in Japan). What is interesting is that the made-in-Japan Fujitsu laptops have prices and features that are similar to the prices and the features of the made-in-China Sony laptops.
What is happening here? How can certain Japanese manufacturers (like Kohjinsha and Fujitsu) possibly price their products so low, keep their high-value manufacturing in Japan, yet still be profitable? What is the secret formula?
Holy crap! Imagine playing Pong on this thing!
A manufacture process than uses robots instead of children (than need to sleep 5 hours a day and eat every once in a while) for repetitive tasks, I'm guessing.
>> The price for the laptop made by Kohjinsha (based in Japan) is $900. The price for a laptop having similar features and made by Lenovo (based in China) is $2000. This pricing is quite surprising.
Similar features? Where?
Kohjinsha:
==========
two thin 10.1 inch widescreen LCD screens with 1024x600 (WSVGA) display
AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 ( 1.6GHz ) processor 1GB of memory (with a max of 4GB)
a 160GB 2.5 inch SATA hard drive
an ATI Radeon HD 3200 internal graphics accelerator
a wireless LAN + Bluetooth
a 1.3 megapixel webcam
Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit.
Lenovo (basic, with nothing extra)
============
Intel Core 2 Duo processor T9600 (2.8GHz 1066MHz 6MBL2)
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64
17" WUXGA 400NIT TFT + 10.6"WXGA+ TFT
NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M 48-core CUDA parallel computing processor 512MB (dedicated)
2 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz SODIMM Memory (1 DIMM)
Ultranav + Fingerprint Reader
Non-RAID HDD, 160 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
Integrated Bluetooth PAN
Intel WiFi Link 5300 (AGN) with My WiFi Technology
Don't tell Xzibit.
Awesome. The SECONDARY display on the Thinkpad has more pixels than both of the Kohjinsha's displays combined.
WSVGA (1024x600) is a step back into the last decade...
The 1.2 GHz K8 is already substantially faster than the 1.6 GHz Atom. The 1.6 GHz K8 will widen the gap even more substantially.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Athlon is a bit more power-hungry, but it's hard to say just how much because this machine also has a bigger screen with the brightest backlight I've seen yet. The battery in this unit is much larger, etc etc. I get the feeling that the Atom-based system is 10-20% better in that department. Short form, if you want the longest runtime, get the Atom... especially if you plan to run anything other than Windows, the only place you're going to get full power management support at this point. (I would guess that there will be Athlon L110 support in the kernel in a tiny version or two.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Kohjinsha is actually a subsidiary of Inventec based out of Taiwan. Inventec designs and manufactures Kohjinsha products.