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Courier lives, kinda, with new Toshiba dual-screen portable

Toshiba announced a new Windows-powered laptop with dual touchscreens and no …

Courier lives, kinda, with new Toshiba dual-screen portable

Today Toshiba announced the Libretto W100, an ultra-mobile PC sporting a pair of 7" 1024 × 600 multitouch screens, a 1.2GHz Pentium U5400 processor, 2GB RAM, and a 62GB solid state disk. The all-touch device is designed to be used as a conventional laptop, and vertically, like a book.

The W100 includes haptic technology, giving the touchscreens tactile feedback; there's also 802.11b/g/n support, Bluetooth, and a built-in camera. This is all in a slightly bulky—7.95" × 4.84" × 1.2"—but lightweight—1.8 lbs (just a hair more than the iPad)—package. In spite of the size, it is certainly a fully-featured machine.

Toshiba is describing the W100 as a "concept PC," an acknowledgement that it won't be a machine suitable for everyone. It will hit the market in August, with prices starting at $1099, albeit with limited availability. The device was shown as part of Toshiba's celebration of 25 years of laptops; the first clamshell laptop was released by Toshiba some 25 years ago.

The company is positioning the W100 as an Ultra Mobile PC—something highly portable, but still in every sense a PC, with all the functionality that entails. The similarity to Microsoft's Courier concept, however, is striking. Courier paired the dual-screen, book-like form-factor with specialized software that fully exploited the touch capabilities to provide a natural, intuitive interface.

However, as with so many tablet-like devices before, the W100 does not do this. The W100 includes Windows 7 Home Premium, which is a perfectly good operating system, but it is not purpose-built for pure touch machines. The user interface is designed for a mouse and a keyboard, and though Windows 7 does include some concessions to touch (for example, it includes an on-screen keyboard with multitouch support, and it enlarges certain interface elements when used with touch machines), it still falls a long way short of the purpose-built interfaces found in so many cell phones and the iPad.

To fill this gap, the W100 does include some custom software: a "Toshiba Bulletin Board," that provides a touch-friendly, widget-based desktop, and "Toshiba ReelTime," with touch-friendly file management. The device can also be used as a more conventional laptop, with one screen serving as a keyboard. A number of keyboard layouts are supported, including a neat split mode for use with thumbs.

The software problem is a continued issue for Microsoft. Given the hardware specs of the W100, Windows 7 is in some ways a natural fit: this is a piece of hardware that's got the horsepower to run fully fledged desktop apps without a problem (in terms of computational capabilities, it has something like five times the integer performance of the A4 processor in the iPad). Using one screen as a keyboard—a keyboard with tactile feedback, no less—arguably also justifies the use of full Windows 7, as it makes the W100 functionally equivalent to a standard laptop.

But if that's all the device is going to be used for, it might as well abandon the second screen and just use a regular keyboard. The unique value of the W100 is that it can be tilted sideways and held like a book with a pair of screens—only it lacks the software to really make use of this mode.

As such, it's hard to see the point of the W100. A similar device based on, say, Android would make sense with the touchscreens, but would then be (in comparison to other Android devices) immensely overpowered, with the drop in battery life that implies. Sticking with Windows 7 limits the utility of the touchscreens, but justifies the stuff under the hood. Combined with the price, it's not hard to see why Toshiba is labeling this a "concept PC." The W100 is unlikely to emulate the iPad's sales figures, and isn't enough—yet—to herald a new era of portable computing.

Channel Ars Technica