Two-screen laptops will balance designer loads

(PhysOrg.com) -- Gordon Alan Stewart, founder and CEO of gScreen Computer in Anchorage, Alaska, has announced the "world's first dual 17-inch LED HD display laptop," to ship in November. The twin-screen SpaceBook, with its magnesium-alloy lid-frame, offers two screens of 17.3 inches each. The screens sit side by side. The panels slide open and closed. These are full 17"-wide HD LED backlit displays (1920 x 1080) with "gorgeous resolution," as one reviewer puts it. The gScreen SpaceBook was created by a video editor and producer’s impassioned effort to come up with a two-screen laptop with workhorse capabilities for like-minded creatives.

Stewart dreamed up the idea in 2003 while planning a working vacation in Hawaii. He needed to work mobile at machines that could support editing video, photography and web design. He dreaded lugging along his computing devices and other gear from hotel to hotel. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, to have one single machine with two screens to do all his tasks. "I realized one morning that I did not want to haul my desktop and extra monitors around to every hotel for editing with the Adobe suite. I started drawing pictures of my dual-screen laptop on a McDonald's napkin, and the rest is history."

He hunted for partners, and finally chose to go it alone. He found manufacturers in China to handle his needs. Stewart says he labored at this one project all these years because he believed in it and in turn could play the patience game. He knew a mobile device of this sort would go down big with designers but now he is surprised to see people contacting him with interest from other areas--doctors, financial traders, and the DoD. The tide of interest reveals knowledge workers alongside designers and other media creatives are weary of switching in and out of screens all day and would welcome what appears to be a way to save time and gain productivity.

The weight is 10 pounds and the battery life is one and a half hours, both of which might be disappointments in an otherwise promising newcomer in mobile computers.

The price range, depending on configuration, runs from $1899 to $2009 and the models run on Windows, from Windows 7 Home Edition to Windows 7 Professional.

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