Acer's dual-screen laptop: no keyboard!

By Richi Jennings. September 13, 2010.

Rumor has it that Acer's working on a laptop with no keyboard: just two multi-touch screens. We've seen this sort of thing before, but not at full laptop size. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder what it's like to type on.

Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention Lou Prime...
(TPE:2353)

Alex Gasparski gasps with astonishment:

From one of our sources, we have received pictures of a laptop ... currently in development ... [with] two touch screens. ... It has no physical keyboard or trackpad but rather a secondary screen for both. ... Both displays are multitouch enabled and the laptop allows you to “swap” screens if you choose.
...
We'd love to see this at the $500 price tag, but somehow our crystal ball isn't agreeing if you know what we mean.

Devin Coldewey adds comparisons to earlier tries:

This is a pretty insane-looking machine.
...
They’re not the first to try it; Toshiba’s Libretto W100 is already out there, but dual 7-inch displays aren’t the same as a full-size laptop. ... I thought the Courier idea worked mainly because it was small enough. ... But we’re looking at two 15″ displays.

Brad Linder is even-handed:

The machine is likely going to consume a lot of power and need a spectacularly high capacity battery. ... On the other hand, the large screen should make typing on a virtual keyboard much easier.

Chris Davies agrees with the first point:

They’ll have to solve questions of battery life. ... Toshiba tried to do that with a low powered processor ... [but had] short runtimes, so how a power-slurping Core i5 will manage remains to be seen

Sean Hollister has seen the future, and it's big:

Dual fifteen-inch multitouch screens, make both the Libretto and MSI's 7-incher look positively dated by comparison. Sadly ... retail availability is probably a long while off, but now you can tell your friends you too saw the future and it looked reasonably good.

But Fred Oliveira is not a fan:

There’s companies that take design leaps of faith, and there’s others that simply can’t.
...
Henry Ford [said] ... “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. ... In a world of laptops with one screen, a laptop with two is only a faster horse. ... In a world of carrier-dominated cellphones with poor performance and flexibility, an iPhone was true innovation.
...
Sometimes I do wish more companies would take real chances at designing the next car.

Meanwhile, hex0D thinks back to the ZX81:

Didn't we all learn the importance of tactile response in a keyboard around the time of the Timex Sinclair?

 
And Finally...
Re-marketing Classic Albums (Lou Prime)

 
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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itbw@richij.com.

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