With innovation comes more consumer choice. Today we are seeing futuristic laptops running Windows Operating System and their makers are coming up with more weird and wonderful laptop designs. From the crazy Lenovo Yoga laptop, some from Acer, Dell and Huawei among others. While most of the more wacky designs have come and gone, we’re now entering another phase of wild experimentation: dual-screen laptops. These are more futuristic laptops and companies are doubling down on this new form factor.
Laptops have largely focused on better displays, trackpads, and battery life in recent years, but this year we’ve started to see laptops with multiple screens emerge. There are 3 futuristic laptops to look out for this year.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo
The ZenBook Pro Duo has not one, but two 4K screens. There’s a 15-inch 16:9 OLED panel where you’d normally find the display on a laptop, then a 32:9 IPS “ScreenPad Plus” screen directly above the keyboard that’s the same width and half the height. It’s as if Asus looked at the MacBook Pro Touch Bar and thought “what if that, but with 32 times as many pixels?”
On the spec side, the ZenBook Pro Duo has up to an eight-core Intel Core i9 processor with an Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU. There are four far-field microphones designed for use with Alexa and Cortana, and there’s an Echo-style blue light at the bottom edge that activates with voice commands. It has a Thunderbolt 3 port, two USB-A ports, a headphone jack, and a full-sized HDMI port.
Asus hasn’t announced pricing or availability for the ZenBook Pro Duo or the ZenBook Duo, but they’re expected to land in the third quarter of this year.
Intel Honeycomb Glacier concept
Perhaps the most wild of these futuristic laptops is this Intel’s idea for dual-screen laptops. Intel’s Honeycomb Glacier is an attempt to bring two screens to the gaming audience — a 15.6-inch 1080p primary panel and a 12.3-inch 1920 x 720 secondary screen — in a way that complements, instead of distracting from, their games.
Intel takes advantage of the extra real estate underneath the hinge to fit a purpose-built cooling mechanism that draws enough additional air across the specially shaped and laid-out motherboard to cool up to 195 watts worth of components using a single fan. That’s enough headroom to potentially fit some of the most powerful gaming laptop parts in a relatively thin chassis. While this prototype is only rocking a 45-watt 8-core Intel CPU and Nvidia GeForce 1060 graphics right now because that’s what Intel had lying around, even those chips are currently overclocked to 60 watts and 95 watts respectively.
HP Omen X 2S
HP recently launched a dual-screen gaming laptop today, with an additional screen above the keyboard. The secondary 6-inch 1080p display is designed to be used with a real-time screen mirroring feature that can cut and magnify parts of the main display (like maps) and let you zoom into them while gaming. You can also use the display to chat to friends on Discord, stream tutorial videos from YouTube, or simply keep an eye on CPU and GPU performance.
The main display on HP’s new Omen X 2S laptop is a 15-inch 1080p panel, with a 144Hz refresh rate or the option to upgrade to a 240Hz model or even a 4K HDR version. As you’d expect in a modern gaming laptop, HP is including Intel’s 9th Gen Intel Core i9 8-core processor, alongside up to 32GB of RAM and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU. HP has developed a special cooling system for the Omen X 2S that involves a liquid metal compound that’s applied to the CPU and should help with heat dissipation and performance. HP claims performance can be boosted by up to 28 percent because of this new thermal solution, but we’ll have to wait for benchmarks and reviews to really test that theory.
The Omen X 2S will be available in June starting at $2,100.
Software for futuristic laptops
The software work will be key to whether these new dual-screen laptops really take off. Some make sense for gaming laptops, but smaller devices that would compete against phones offer questionable benefit. Google is also planning to natively support foldables in Android, and it already has the mobile platform advantage to better bridge the gap between phones and tablets.
That won’t stop PC makers, though. We’ve seen years of wild 2-in-1 PCs, and with foldable displays, new hinges, and this push for dual displays we’re about to witness laptops getting really weird and wonderful again.
