Engadget’s Ross Miller is attending CEATAC in Tokyo–it’s the Consumer Electronics Show of Japan, only far weirder–and among the gizmos he’s encountered is a prototype of a netbook with two screens (photo borrowed from Engadget):

My instinctive response to dual-screen laptops of all sorts (which I wrote about here) is that they take the best thing about portable computers–the fact that they’re easy to quickly and efficiently use almost anywhere–and mess it up. If you want more pixels than an ordinary netbook provides, wouldn’t it be more practical to buy a larger, higher-resolution single-screen notebook? Wouldn’t this machine intrude on your seatmate’s real estate if you tried to use it on an airplane? And I like to take laptops literally and use them on my lap…a scenario in which double-screen models seem particularly unwieldy.

Every time I look at a two-screener, including this one, it seems to say “We’re doing this because it’s technically feasible, not because real people would want to use this in the real world.”

Then again, you could argue that real people have never gotten the chance to give two-screen notebooks a yay or a nay–yery few of the dualies that have been invented have ever made it to market. Do you think it’s an idea that’ll ever catch on?

 
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