It’s been two years since we first heard about it, but gScreen has finally brought their SpaceBook dual-screen laptop behemoth to market. Well, gScreen is taking down payments, anyway.
2009 was the last time we saw the mainstream release of a dual-screen laptop with Lenovo’s w700ds. Despite the weight of Lenovo behind it, the model wasn’t a success, with reviewers finding the slide-out 10.6″ screen buggy. That aside, while an extra screen was useful, abysmal battery life of 1.5-2 hours, an eye-watering price tag of over three grand and a generally imposing bulk, Lenovo’s offer didn’t gain much traction and we haven’t heard much about dual-screen laptops since.
Enter gScreen. Their SpaceBooks don’t just sport two screens, but two giant 17″ 1920×1080 LED-backlit screens. Weight is listed on the gScreen site at a beefy ten pounds, and the computer measures nearly two inches thick. SpaceBooks come in two flavors, running $2395 for an Intel i5 dual-core 2.66 ghz processor and 4GB of DDR3 RAM, or $2795 to step up to an i7 quad-core processor and 8GB of RAM. Both models come with Nvidia GeForce GTS 250M GPUs and 500GB hard drives.
An estimated battery life isn’t listed, but it’s hard to imagine that with both displays folded out user will get any more than a couple of hours of use. Of course, we’d guess gScreen’s response would be that ultraportability isn’t the point. Unlike Lenovo’s past offering, in which an extra little screen was cool but not essential enough to justify lugging it around everywhere, gScreen has a complete dual-screen setup that’s far more portable than a comparable desktop solution would be. As a mobile workstation, gScreen might just have something. Designers and those in finance, to name a couple, could certainly find use in being able to bring a pair of screens with them anywhere.
As a niche manufacturer, gScreen has certainly carved out their space. But only time will tell if dedication to building dual-screen giants will pay off.
