The World's First Four-Screen Laptop

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.

Useful

[sopssa]

Seems strange that they would put the screens above the keyboard.

Actually, when done correctly it works good. Myself I have Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard [logitech.com], which has 320x240 color LCD on the top of keyboard. Now I dont play much, but I find the keyboard really nice with its extra buttons that you can use for macros etc (and I get teh nerdy "command center" feel ;)

The main thing I use it for is the cpu/ram meters. I know I could get it on the screen aswell, but I dont like that as I tend to run everything on fullscreen.. browser, visual studio, irc and just alt-tab between them. That is why desktop widgets dont work, because I never see them. On the other hand always-on-top widgets would be in the way all the time. But when its running on the lcd screen on keyboard that I dont all the time use for something else, its nice.

Another thing that I frequently use with the LCD is the YouTube player. When people paste some youtube link, I copy it to clipboard and instead of opening new browser tab and bringing it on top of the screen, it starts playing on the lcd screen. That way I can watch the video without actually putting all my concentration on it.

The screen is also great for providing all kinds of information from various programs, like chat windows, irc, rss reader, music player, stats or healthbars and so on in games. On an interesting note, someone even developed a counter-strike hack that used the lcd screen to display its menu and a radar. That way there wasn't any hack related menus etc on the actual screen, so screenshots didn't catch it.

However it looks like you would be looking at that laptop's screens from 45 or higher angle, which cant be that nice. Maybe they could had added another surface between screen and keyboard so that it would be angled better. But like the article says, its just a prototype to show off intel's experiements, and not likely a product.

Extra small screens can be really useful. It's a great place to show information or content that would get in the way if it was on your actual monitor. Having second monitor on side usually tends to go into other purposes and isn't usually on the view as good as lcd on top of your keyboard.

access to multiple desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

If the touch screens represented the active desktops, that would be neato. You could just tap one to switch it out with the deskop displayed on the panel.

Re:That's a laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well duh - This was a prototype from 1996. Those are touchscreen CRTs.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why three touchscreens?

[nojayuk]

This is a prototype, not a production machine and there isn't anyone making very long thin touchscreens. Intel put three standard screens (I presume something like 800x480 resolution, the sort most high-end smartphones use) into a laptop chassis. On a production machine there would be a purpose-built touchscreen (2400 x 480 pixels perhaps) occupying the same space as the three displays do in the prototype.