The Hybrid and Slate concept notebooks introduce new ways of relating the screen to the base of a notebook.
It wouldn’t be CES without a couple bizarre concepts floating around on the trade floor, and Sony obliged with two interesting Vaio concepts at its Monday press conference: the Hybrid and Slate. If you can excuse the generic names, both concepts actually introduce innovative concepts. Most notably, the Slate does away with the assumption that a notebook’s display and keyboard have to be linked with a hinge. The LCD detaches entirely, giving you the freedom to move it around on a desk as you would with a desktop monitor and keyboard. The Hybrid, meanwhile, offers both a tablet and laptop experience, but with a new mechanism for reversing the display that differs from the usual swiveling neck. Sony had little more to offer on either prototype, and there are no firm plans for production.
