The World's First Four-Screen Laptop 134
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the four-is-better-right dept.
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.
Touchscreens... (Score:5, 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.
Re:Touchscreens... (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.
Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
not very creative (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Touchscreens... (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.
Re:Why don't they... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/
http://www.techrevision.com/2007/06/13/lcd_keyboard
Re:Useful (Score:3, 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.
WTF, those tiny LCDs count as screens? (Score:4, Insightful)
LoB
Re:Useful (Score:3, 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.