Laptop Next

To make the simultaneous view of multiple applications, a prototype laptop is being shown by Intel which has four screens to increase the display area. This laptop has three OLED (organic light emitting diode) touch screens which are lying just above the keyboard along with a primary LCD screen, situated at usual position. The system will be shown at Intel Developer Forum at San Francisco and has been code-named to Tangent-Bay. The prototype being displayed is not exactly stylish-looking; however the extra screens succeed in adding some convenience. In a demonstration, these small screens were used to display a photo album, a music playlist and a calculator which could all be efficiently operated via touch screens while running different applications on main screen.

The limit on the number of screens that can be available on the laptop has been pushed by Tangent Bay. Earlier companies like Lenovo released two screen laptops which had an auxiliary display that could slide out behind the LCD screen. The prototype is shown by Intel in the hope of building a commercial product by system builders after picking up this design.

To offer another example of how a four screen system can be useful, Renuka Awasthi, Marketing manager of Intel, said that a person scouring web for vacation deals could launch chat sessions, a calculator and weather report on other screens. She also added that there is no limitation to the applications that can be run on the auxiliary screens and people value real estate of additional display.

A study showed that some laptop users have 20 to 30 applications running at a time which makes it difficult to find information by sorting through them. The prototype design by Intel came up after this study. Intel representatives declined to provide detailed hardware description but it is known that the four screen laptop uses Integrated Intel graphics and standard-voltage Intel Core 2 CPU.