Toshiba Libretto W100 resurrects the classic UMPC brand with dual 7-inch displays
6/22/2010 01:45:00 AM
kenmouse
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Oh yes, Toshiba's dualscreen laptop of sorts is real, and it's exactly what you've inevitably been staring at right up there. In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the company's laptop business, Tosh gave its classic Libretto ultraportable brand some mouth-to-mouth with the W100. Yeah, we couldn't believe it ourselves when we saw it, but the device certainly is legit -- it has two 7-inch, 1024 x 600-resolution touchscreens, and is powered by a 1.2GHz Intel Pentium U5400 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 64GB SSD and Windows 7 Home Premium. We know -- it's all pretty zany, and though Toshiba is calling it a "concept PC," it's actually planning to bring it to market for $1,099 within the next few months on a limited basis. Thought we were done with the info? Surely not, we've got you covered with shots below and some in-depth hands-on impressions after the break.
The 1.2-inch thick Libretto W100 is covered in a black brushed aluminum finish, and is surrounded by a single USB port, an SD card reader and headphone jack. We're not entirely sure how we feel about the design and the logo on its cover, but it's still a darn cute little laptop, and at 1.8 pounds it felt quite light in our hands. We caveat this by saying that the model we saw a few weeks ago was an early pre-production unit, but it was running quite warm and the fan noise was extremely noticeable. We're not sure why Tosh went with an Intel ULV processor instead of an Atom here -- we expect the endurance even with its six-cell to be less than four hours.
So, how does the whole touch thing work? To start, the capacitive screens were quite responsive, but the concerns we have come in software. Tosh has preloaded its bulletin board touch software that let's you customize a widget-like interface, but what you're really dealing with here is Windows 7. You can choose to extend the desktop to the other screen or you can hit the physical keyboard button and just use the bottom screen as a keyboard. Speaking of that virtual keyboard, Toshiba has created six different layouts -- yes, six! You can check out some of those in the gallery, but the split keyboard is pretty cool if you want to just use your thumbs, and we're big fans of the haptic feedback. As we mentioned earlier, we saw a very early unit, so the software was fairly unstable -- we had issues moving windows from one screen to another and the accelerometer was quite flaky. We're sure the final product will be much more polished for its $1k+ price tag, but Toshiba's certainly stressing that this device will be a very limited run and is meant for "early adopters." So then, early adopters, we ask you: are you going to pick up one of the first dualscreen tablets to grace our fine universe?
Editor's Note: We'll be getting some more hands-on time with the W100 later this week so stay tuned for some video of the dualscreen madness.
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