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If you like a lot of screen real estate then this latest machine might just make your next shortlist. Kitguru reader Ponni sent us information on a new machine which is going to ship with not one, but two 17.3 inch screens.
The Gscreen Spacebook is currently only available for pre-order in America, available in two configurations. Both of them are currently being offered for 50% off, at $2,395 and $2,795 respectively.
The cheaper model features dual 1920×1080 screens, with a Core i5 560m 2.66ghz processor and 4GB of 1333mhz DDR3 memory. It ships with an Nvidia GTS 250M which has 1GB of memory. Storage is supplied from a 500GB 7,200 rpm hard drive. The more expensive model has the same core components, but ships with a Core i7 740QM and doubles the memory count to 8GB.
The website has only a single picture of the machine which is currently eye catching. Both of them weigh 10 pounds which in UK terms is 4.5kg. Not something you will be carrying around with you on a daily basis, thats for sure. We would love to see the chassis from a variety of angles, but for now this will have to do.
We sent a message to ask if the company are willing to ship outside the States, but have yet to receive an answer back from their sales department. We would assume it is possible, but expensive.
Kitguru says: Dual 17 inch screens. Does it appeal to you designers and photographers, for serious work based duties in hotel rooms?
Do the screens fold over in the middle? how the hell do you transport this about? a hinge in there would look awful.
Id need to see more pictures to make a better call.
Having spent years working on an off in photography (and losing another 3 hours of my life to colour management last night – thank you Adobe for still not fixing the bugs from CS2), I can say I’d maybe want a dual screen laptop – but not like this.
Firstly £2000 for a last generation processor? WT…?
Secondly – and laptop manufacturers take note – the Holy Grail for photographers is vertical resolution, not horizontal. Over 90% of professional photography is taken in portrait orientation or square format (landscape photographers may have 10 or 20 images a week to sort through, but ‘people’ photographers can take hundreds of images every day – and there’s far more people working in fashion, corporate, glamour etc.). Yet most image handling programs (Lightroom being by far the worst offender, but they’re all bad) squander vertical resolution with extra bars and tabs and captions and any amount of crap that could be put somewhere else or omitted altogether. We spend our lives hiding and showing the controls due to bad UI design – and Adobe only consults its fanboys on redesigns.
One thing that Apple do right on the MacBook Pro is 1200 pixels rather than 1080, but I’ve always wanted a square laptop with a really high quality 1600×1600 screen.
But choice doesn’t exist in the laptop market – one of the reasons it’s dying.
So dual screen laptop that had the option to be 1920×2016 would be worth considering. This though looks like a heavy waste of time for photography.
I think it would be more useful for text work and publishing, but still suffers from the problem that the centre of your vision (assuming you’re using the on board keyboard to type) is the split – three 15 inch screens always works better for horizontal expansion.
Well its dollars not pounds, which makes a fair difference to the price. However, I doubt they will ship this to the UK for anyone interested as the shipping, warranty etc. would be immensely complicated and expensive for both parties.
I thought I saw a UK company selling a dual screen laptop a while ago, rock was it?
Good points Daniel, I agree on screen shape too.