[Summary: 2-screen laptops need fairly deep software support because 2 screens don't look like 1 screen. I excerpted freely below; see the link for the entire story. --gnu]
http://www.afr.com/f/free/technology/digitallife/g_ZWzfPcJsePV9VdQfxY9w1H Sony's tablet a good idea gone wrong PUBLISHED: 30 Mar 2012 The best thing that can be said about Sony's new $729 Tablet P is that it means well. The central idea that must have led to the construction of the Tablet P -- that iPads are too large -- is pretty sound. iPads are too large, at least for a lot of users (the staff here at the Digital Life Labs included), and at least for a lot of applications. So, yes, Sony was trying to solve a genuine problem when it came up with the Tablet P, a tablet that folds in half so you can slip it into your pocket or purse, that's light enough to read e-books on for hours without your hand cramping, and small enough that you can use it as a camera without looking like a total tool. The trouble was, they couldn't make it happen, not with today's technology. To have a tablet fold in two, you either need one screen that folds in two, or you need two screens with absolutely no bezel, so that one screen blends seamlessly with the other screen when they're placed side by side. Neither of those technologies are available today, so all Sony's engineers could come up with was two screens, each with a modest 4 mm bezel that, when placed next to the other bezel, creates a whopping great 9 mm-wide black bar right in the middle of the display. (The other millimetre is the gap between the displays, which can be quite irritating if there's light behind the display, shining through.) Now, that wouldn't be completely fatal if the Tablet P were running an operating system that knew how to handle two screens with a black bar and a sliver of light in the middle of them. But the Tablet P is running Android, and neither Android nor most Android apps have a clue how to use the dual display. Some apps on the Tablet P, chiefly the ones Sony has rewritten specifically for the device, work quite well. The email app, for instance, uses one screen as a virtual keyboard, and the other screen as a display, when you're creating emails. When you're viewing emails, one screen is used to list the items in the inbox, and the other screen is used to preview the highlighted item. But trouble arises when you use apps other than the ones written to cope with the black bar. Most apps will just curl up into a ball and display only on one of the two screens. Neither of those screens is very large, so you end up with apps displaying little bigger than they would on a mobile phone. Worse yet, they're both very long and narrow, far more so than many apps seem able to cope with, and as a result many apps won't even fully utilise the one small screen they're on. Amazon's Kindle app, for instance, an app so well written that it can usually cope with any screen you throw at it, uses only 83 per cent of one screen, and zero per cent of the other. Almost 60 per cent of the Tablet P's display is left blank. It's such a pity, because a tablet that folds in two is such a good idea. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the Tablet P is not that it means well, but that it's simply ahead of its time. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel