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."

Better Eat Your Wheaties!

[garcia]

And the best part: it can run for "hundreds of hours without draining your notebook battery," according to the PortalPlayer site.

I'd like to see some real world numbers for this. Watching video and using wifi (to access the flight schedule information) would certainly drain the battery a bit faster than "100s of hours" before delving into your notebook battery.

Mmmm, marketingspeak.

Dual-screen?

[ThinkWeak]

When I talk about dual-screens, I typically refer to the ability to utilize two screens at the same time to accomplish tasks. Having a screen on top of my laptop would just one more thing to replace when someone slams their overpacked suitcase up against my laptop case in the overhead.

Now show me a laptop that folds open to have two 19" screens side-by-side and you have yourself a deal.

Re:All this while switched off?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why a few hours? You can get around 8 hours of time out of a Nintendo DS with it's dual screens while playing games. I would imagine that a laptop battery is considerably more powerful than the DS battery.

Re:We need dual screens on the inside.

[DarthTaco]

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...

I think a good head mounted display would be the better option. They aren't there yet, but I expect they will be before long. Something like the glastron with higher resolution and some minimal motion tracking.

Computing on a plane would be easier with the options provided by this method. Battery powered macmini, split keyboard, i-glasses or glastron or whatever.

This would be a nice option for PDAs. Not for their typical use, but for portable computing.

Re:Better Eat Your Wheaties!

[gEvil (beta)]

I believe they're saying that the small screen uses the notebook battery, but that the notebook battery is such a ridiculously overpowered power source for such a tiny device/screen that you can use it for hundreds of hours without making much of a dent to the battery's overall charge.

Re:All this while switched off?

[The MAZZTer]

A DS is specialized for playing games in a handheld form. As such it was designed to draw as little power as possible so the battery life could be prolonged.

On the other hand, you have laptops with USB ports, hard disks, GBs of memory, large screens (these are the real power drainers I hear), disc drives, etc etc etc all which need power. And being PC compatible they can't really be too optimized to perform specific functions because they are general-purpose PCs. And when selecting a battery (plus the above components) they have to concern themselves about weight and price and heat and umm... chance of explosions... umm... so battery life is just another variable to balance in this equation, and unfortunately to keep some variables down or up others have to be lowered.

Just stupid

[Sylver Dragon]

Am I the only person that hates the little screens put on the outside of the shells of flip cell phones?
The reason I buy a flip phone is because I want to protect the screen when it is in my pocket. Now, insted of a nice protective plastic cover, I have another LCD screen which can get broken. Now they want to do this to my laptop? No! The last thing my laptop needs is a screen that will get destroyed the firt time I accidentally hit a table with my laptop bag.
The clamshell top has a purpose, to protect the screen, it is not just wasted space which could use another fragile part.