Laptopia! The World’s Weirdest Portable Computers
Twenty-one innovative, impractical, irresistable breakthroughs in mobile technology.Posted by Harry McCracken | Monday, September 7, 2009
Laptop computer with detachable display for overhead projector
Patent filed August 10th, 1990
It seems like ancient history, but there was indeed a time–not so long ago–when offices everywhere had overhead projectors. This laptop had a removable screen (apparently on a six-foot cable) with a detachable back, letting you plop the screen on a projector for presentations. The basic idea came to market (briefly) in the form of the ThinkPad 755CV.
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September 14th, 2009 at 6:10 am[…] concepts that designers have come up with in the mobile gear space. Technologizer has rounded up 21 of the weirdest mobile gadgets from Google Patents and laid them out for our amazement. There’s the laptop with the […]
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» Weirdest Mobile Computers Susan's Lookout Says:
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September 16th, 2009 at 12:49 am[…] concepts that designers have come up with in the mobile gear space. Technologizer has rounded up 21 of the weirdest mobile gadgets from Google Patents and laid them out for our amazement. There’s the laptop with the integrated […]
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Weird (and not so weird) laptop designs | GottaBeMobile.com Says:
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:18 pm[…] up some patents for unusual portable computing devices and put them together in a segment entitled “Laptopia! The World’s Weirdest Portable Computers”. Indeed, there is some weird, wild stuff in their list, but I have to say, I’m really not […]
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Weird (and not so weird) laptop designs | GottaBeMobile.com Says:
June 4th, 2010 at 6:08 pm[…] up some patents for unusual portable computing devices and put them together in a segment entitled “Laptopia! The World’s Weirdest Portable Computers”. Indeed, there is some weird, wild stuff in their list, but I have to say, I’m really not […]
September 8th, 2009 at 1:02 am
I'm not sure what the little stick the guy is holding in slide 8 is, but I want it. All laptops should come with little stick peripherals from this day forward.
January 28th, 2012 at 6:36 pm
Maybe that's what the Universal Serial Bus(USB) was all about.
diy flight simulator cockpit. There's still some way to go before it gets as advanced as in that picture.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:54 am
I imagine most of the labeled items in slide 8 are stink lines.
September 14th, 2009 at 4:00 am
#13 looks like my first Nokia phone, the 6820.
December 18th, 2010 at 7:54 am
#14 Appears military-intended. The ability to self-contain a corded phone and mouse with a slotted cubby space would come in really handy for all sorts of contractors.
November 10th, 2011 at 4:16 am
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September 14th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Left out the Canon NoteJet series of the 1990s which were Canon Laptops (similar to the Innova Book Line) with built in Canon Notejet printers and available scanner cartridges. interesting machines but at a terribly expensive price point at the time.
September 16th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Ergonomic Laptop & Keyboard.
The number 6 is on the wrong side. Yes, I know that’s how MS does/did it on their early split boards. Those are wrong, too. At least, if you were taught as I was. The right index finger is supposed to type it.
September 17th, 2009 at 5:40 am
#10, the Zeos Freestyle with screen on a swivel hinge, is hardly weird.
It’s basically a convertible Tablet PC, which are far more prevalent on the market than the pure, keyboard-less slates that you may be thinking of when you hear the term “Tablet PC”.
Especially odd since you seem to know of early Tablet PC efforts like the AST PenExec.
September 19th, 2009 at 4:21 am
On slide six, the link to the Zeos wikipedia article is used twice, and the link to 'picoprojector' is left out.
February 19th, 2012 at 11:26 pm
This is an excellent post. I learned a lot about what you talking about. Not sure if I agree with you completely though.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:47 am
the stick in number 8 is coming to market soon. sony is making it for their ps3. though there is still no official name for it. It has accelermeters and is traced by a cammera
October 26th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
#8 in use with US military techs. Eyeball HUD very useful when upside down in tank with both hand pulling wires
November 13th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I HATE the navigation on this site.
I really do NOT want to have to click twenty-freakin-three times just to read one article that should comfortably fit on probably 4 or 5 pages – just so you can impress your advertisers with a grandiose number of ‘page impressions’ per visitor.
Additionally, you’re totally screwing your site crawlability. To Google et. al, page 23 appears as being 23 clicks (levels down) from the article index. You don’t even have an index page that deep-links directly to the individual sub-page by name.
FFS it’s 2009, 1997.
November 22nd, 2009 at 11:17 am
#2 is a rack mounted slide out workstation.
December 7th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
#14 Appears military-intended. The ability to self-contain a corded phone and mouse with a slotted cubby space would come in really handy for all sorts of contractors.
And while we’re at it, I agree, the navigation on this website needs an update. There is a real need for it to act more modern than the decades-old patents we’re laughing and boggling at.
December 9th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Number 9 isn’t as crazy as you may think. Check out these “ergonomic” keyboards:
Kinesis Freestyle Ascent (http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/images/solo-ascent-90_512x390.jpg)
SafeType (http://www.safetype.com/) – this one actually has side view mirrors (!!!) so you can see the keys
August 27th, 2010 at 9:27 am
The problem with SafeType is the constant holding of the lower arms straight out with no support. It will cause fatigue of the biceps.
The best one I saw was a home-made model where a Dvorak keyboard was split with each piece attached to the side of the chair. The hands would be hanging comfortably at the sides, palms facing the body, no pronation, nothing. The inventor of this keyboard design was starting to suffer from RSI when he got the idea.
He should patent it 😉
December 31st, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Overhead projectors are still in use. In my college, they are integrated into the ceiling of every lecture and meeting room. The screen is electrically operated, and there are connectors for the audio and video-out of the laptops. The main use is to be able to provide tutorials for applications, Powerpoint presentations for lectures and papers. Hardly anyone uses acetate sheets with handwritten text and drawings.
January 7th, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Some computers are strange in their design, but I dare to imagine that our future computer will be even more bizarre. thank you
February 16th, 2010 at 6:49 pm
The swiveling screen (#10) is in use on OLPCs and is rather nice (especially since in the OLPC version, you can flip it all the way around and lock it down to have a gameconsole-like tablet.)
Also, second the complaints about the godsawful navigation. It’s physically painful, and poorly implemented. Or perhaps that’s an implementation success – if reading your site hurts, people are more likely to click away, thus enabling you to reach high clickthrough rates without having to resort to low-grade content to drive visitors away?
March 29th, 2010 at 9:42 am
@nameless –
Apple invented the tablet. How dare you imply otherwise?
March 29th, 2010 at 9:51 am
A few with actual pictures might have been nice. Patent searches are largely a waste of time. We want to see actual pictures. Not drawings of devices that the patent holders probably never intended to create anyways. Boring.
August 27th, 2010 at 9:30 am
But many of these designs never made it to even prototype stage. he did give links to actual pictures of some that did but what of the collection of those that did not?
That is why we have an imagination 😉
April 26th, 2010 at 11:42 am
The 3 hole punch notebook you like so much would just require an ipad case with a 3 hold punched tab hanging off the side, maybe even just little retractable rings. get on it entrepreneurs.
May 1st, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Is it only me that’s reminded of the HP Touchsmart Mini or whatever it’s called – in fact, most tablet computers, including the Latitude and everything – when looking at #10?
I agree, this should be on one page.
May 29th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
IIRC #8 was intended as a wearable computer for use while servicing equipment. The idea being to throw up overlays of what was being worked on in order to speed up fault finding, etc.
Versions of this are still being used by divers (usually a chording keyboard is attached to the leg for text entry) doing underwater servicing and reef surveys among other things.
November 5th, 2010 at 10:00 am
#10 was never intended to be used as a tablet. The screen on the Freestyle cannot rotate 180 degrees and then foldback upon the chassis. It had a short life due to it's design and construction quality. It simply had a high failure rate. ZEOS had introduced better models designed with Sanyo around that time and it was dropped after diligently trying to keep it going. Zeos went on to make some pretty neat laptops. Check out the ZEOS Pocket pc and the Transport (released by Micron post merger). Yes, by the way, I used to work there.
December 9th, 2010 at 5:07 am
Is there any particular reason why the person who wrote these slides keeps comparing them to Apple products…? You know.. there are other laptops around.
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September 30th, 2011 at 2:56 am
Maybe it’s unfair to include this design in a gallery of weird laptops–it swivels like a desktop monitor in a way that was both clever and useful. Zeos sold this design as the Freestyle in the early 1990s; I don’t know how successful it was, but I’m guessing it wasn’t a huge hit, since it didn’t last long.Suchmaschinenoptmierung
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October 20th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Good stuff as per usual, thanks. I do hope this kind of thing gets more exposure.
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November 3rd, 2011 at 4:21 pm
the stick in number 8 is coming to market soon. sony is making it for their ps3. though there is still no official name for it. It has accelermeters and is traced by a cammera
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November 4th, 2011 at 3:51 pm
I really do NOT want to have to click twenty-freakin-three times just to read one article that should comfortably fit on probably 4 or 5 pages – just so you can impress your diminished value with a grandiose number of 'page impressions' per visitor. Additionally, you're totally screwing your site crawlability. To Google et. al, page 23 appears as being 23 clicks (levels down) from the article index. You don't even have an index page with angry birds online that deep-links directly to the individual sub-page by name.
November 11th, 2011 at 5:18 am
Hi there just wanted to give you a brief heads up and let you know a few of the images aren’t loading correctly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different browsers and both show the same outcome.
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November 12th, 2011 at 1:39 am
Herewith, a gallery of designs from Google Patents (click the filing dates to see the patents). There?s only one in here I might have considered buying, but on some perverse level I admire them all.
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November 25th, 2011 at 11:34 pm
There have been a number of weird laptop designs over the years. From the “ebook”, LG's badly named laptop, which runs on liquid fuel rather than a rechargeable battery, to ThinkPad's 755, whose screen can be removed and put on an overhead projector, laptop designers have tried a number of strange things to make their laptop stand out.
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