The attack of the 2-headed laptop
- January 6, 2009 1:26 PM |
- By Paul Jay
by Peter Nowak, CBCNews.ca.
Is the world ready for a two-headed laptop? Lenovo thinks it is. The Chinese electronics maker, which owns IBM’s old computer division, on Tuesday made one of the more interesting pre-announcements to the Consumer Electronics Show, which officially begins Thursday. Lenovo announced the availability of its new ThinkPad W700, which features a second monitor that slides out from behind the main screen.
The second screen is 10.6 inches across, or about the size of Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10 netbook. It’s designed to give users more “real estate” to play with when doing tasks like editing photos or video. Each screen has its own hard drive and can function independently of the other, which makes it ideal for people dealing with digital content, the company said in its release.
The laptop ain’t going cheap, though. It’s available in Canada immediately with a price tag of $5,073. Here’s a YouTube video with all the details
About the Authors
- Tara Kimura
is a multimedia producer for CBCNews.ca.
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Comments (2)
A dual monitor system is something you don't need when you're using your laptop as a portable, i.e. actually traveling with it. 2 monitors are a super productivity booster when you're at home or at the office, but there it's much cheaper than 5 grand to just have a laptop with a graphics card that supports a dual monitor configuration and plug in a standard desktop monitor to your machine. A nice big one even, like 19" or more - for about 2 grand less.
And why would you need a hard drive for each monitor? Seems like a pretty dumb, really overpriced, idea to me. 5K can buy much better, and more practical solutions.
What is needed is a computer with two independent CPU-s. The second would be a small, cheap one with a hardwired operating system and a hardwired browser, to be used primarily to connect to sites requiring absolute security - e.g., some e-mail, bank accounts, trading accounts, Paypal and the like. It would have to be sufficiently separate from the main CPU that it would be impossible for it to become infected or to allow an infection on the main CPU to read keystrokes or incoming messages.
I've achieved something like that by using an old laptop for absolutely secure communications. I reformatted the hard drive before reloading the operating system and NEVER surf on it or download anything to it. I don't care if my main computer gets infected. I don't even keep an anti-virus program running in the background to slow it down. Every once in a while I run the anti-virus program and clean out infections if I've picked one up. Seems to work.