Twin-touch-display laptops: early 2009?

In Monday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches the rumor-mill grind the wheat that makes the flour that bakes the bread of 2009's laptop designs. Not to mention a potential problem with the upcoming Star Trek MMORPG...

What's happening in Mike Elgan's world?

Asustek, also known as ASUS -- the people who make the Eee PC -- plans to ship new notebooks that have touch screens on both the top (where the screen normally goes) and the bottom (where the keyboard normally goes) as early as the first quarter of next year ... I believe [this] is the future of nearly all mainstream notebooks from both Microsoft's OEM partners and from Apple.

The basic design will be, I believe, one that has screens on both the top and the bottom, just like the next version of the One Laptop Per Child project ... These laptops are reportedly designed to work with the upcoming Windows 7 operating system ... .

Huu Nguyen adds:

The hot ASUS rumor of the week-end is that the company might ship a screen-only laptop (like the OLPC 2.0) in the first quarter of 2009.
...
Obviously, such a laptop would require additional software to handle the virtual keyboard (the one in Windows is too basic) and finger gestures ... To make it really cool, ASUS needs to provide an SDK and get developers (Adobe, EA...) to build custom virtual keyboards.
...
The screen is the #1 battery life sucker, so we bet that it would be small, as battery life will be a huge problem ... We would love to see such a prototype ("see", may be not "buy"), but I would not hold my breath for a commercial release in Q1 2009.

Loren Heiny sits on it: [That's enough puerile name jokes -Ed.]

All this talk of multi-touch makes sense considering that Microsoft is set to publicly reveal the multi-touch-enabled Windows 7 for the first time at this month’s PDC event.

I’m still a bit skeptical where this is going though (in the short term)–even with my strong enthusiasm for Tablet and touch technologies. I guess we’ll find out part of the answer to this at PDC when a build of Windows 7 will be made available. How far will multi-touch be supported in Windows 7? Are we talking about extended mouse events that support multiple users? New gestures? Or might we be talking about new eventing that only apps written in let’s say the .NET platform might be able to take advantage of? And what about Microsoft’s apps, such as IE and Office?
...
Maybe I’m having an off day, but with the resounding silence I hear from Microsoft up to this point, the more I’m concerned I hear history repeating itself. Fingers crossed that my anxiety is poorly placed.

But Luigi Lugmayr has his doubts:

Notebook concepts featuring two touchscreens and no physical keyboards are in the works. We already reported in 2007 about the Estari 2-VU laptop featuring two touchscreens.

I doubt that the first Windows 7 touch screen notebooks will have two screens. It is a cool concept, but typing on a virtual keyboard on a touch-screen is not really working well yet.

Trust StarWarsFan to make the obligatory obvious observation:

It's like the Nintendo DS of laptops!

And finally...

• A potential problem with the upcoming Star Trek MMORPG

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• EXTRA: Eee PC 900A netbook below $300
• Ballmer throws chair at Gartner; throws bone to Yahoo!
• G1 from Google/Android/T-Mobile: first reviews are in