In a review of two new business books, this week’s Time magazine (subscription required) notes that “breakthrough products beget a me-too army of competitors.” This is true in many facets of American business but perhaps no more than in technology, where the iPad has apparently scared scores of companies into rushing to market with copycat tablets and wacky gadgets designed to prevent Apple from owning the mobile market.
This week it’s Toshiba’s turn. The company, which was once one of the biggest laptop players in the world, has come up with the Libretto W100. It’s a 7-inch dual screen multi-touch device that, according to Information Week, “works horizontally or vertically. When held vertically, users page through both displays. When held horizontally, the lower screen serves as a keyboard and the upper screen as the display monitor.”
Toshiba appears to be hedging its bets with the experimental form factor. The company says a “limited number of the W100 concept PCs will be available for purchase” later this summer.
Still, the company is targeting a market that it sees as being left open by Apple and other tablet form factors. A Toshiba executive told the Telegraph that the W100, which runs Windows 7 Home Premium, is better suited to content creation than the iPad. That may be, because its virtual keyboard has haptic feedback, giving users a sense of typing on physical keys.
The company also says it’s great for media consumption. The 3D accelerometer “allows the W100 to rotate into portrait or landscape modes, making the device look and feel more like a book, newspaper or magazine.” It’s unclear if the dual screens function as an actual book, with consecutive pages shown on each screen. If the answer is yes, I think that’s a bonus over standard single-screen e-readers, which require more scrolling.
The W100 goes a step beyond basic multitasking by enabling users to “surf the Web on one screen while checking email on the other, view two documents simultaneously or view a webpage across both screens.” (That last attribute would be fine if it weren’t for the gap between displays).
Toshiba is certainly getting a lot of attention for the W100. A Google search turned up over 180 news articles and more than 60 blog posts on the new device. It is innovative, although Toshiba’s not the first company to conceive a dual-screen device. Microsoft, of course, cancelled just such a thing, the Courier, earlier this year. For more basic e-book functions, there is the Entourage Edge. MSI and Asus are also reportedly working on dual-screen readers.
However, Toshiba’s is the first to market with PC-like capability. Further, Toshiba has the deep pockets to withstand some losses as (if and when?) the W100 goes mainstream.
Will Toshiba become known as the company who popularized the dual-screen form factor, or as the biggest company to produce the first large scale dual-screen flop?
Readers, weigh in.
Lisa
