Gaming laptops are interesting beasts that have to balance portability with the performance you’d expect from a high-end gaming computer. One of the first compromises is usually the display — you may want a big-screen monitor for your gaming desktop, but anything larger than 15.6 inches tends to make for an unwieldy laptop.
So it’s no surprise that at first glance the Compal GEMINI gaming laptop looks like a 15.6 inch notebook. But it has an extra trick up its sleeve… or rather an extra display panel.
The result is a notebook that you can use like a 15.6 inch laptop or a notebook with 17.8 inches of screen space.
Here’s the idea — when you want more screen space you pull the primary display upward and and a second display slides upward to meet the bottom, giving you 1.5X the screen real estate.
You will see a thin black line between the two screens, so this might not be the perfect solution if you wanted to span content across both displays. But you can use the second screen to view chat boxes, maps, or other in-game content. Or when you’re not gaming you could use the dual-screen laptops to view multiple apps at once, watch a video while answering emails, or for other multitasking purposes.
Because the screens + hinges take up more space on this laptop than a typical notebook, there’s no room for a touchpad beneath the space bar. So Compal put it to the right of the keyboard instead. That’s probably bad news for lefties, but you can always connect a mouse or other input accessories.
Like most of the Compal designs we’ve covered over the past week or so, the GEMINI isn’t a real thing you can buy just yet. Compal is a contract manufacturer based in Taiwan, and the company doesn’t produce and sell computers under its own name. But Compal did recently win an IF Design Award for the GEMINI, so maybe we’ll see someone hire the company to produce a laptop based on this design soon.
That said, the design is awfully reminiscent of the Intel Honeycomb Glacier prototype unveiled in mid-2019. So maybe the GEMINI and/or Honeycomb Glacier will be a real product one day.
Now we can play game and cheat engine side by side. Nice
So basically that Honeycomb Glacier from last May, but there’s less of a gap between displays now.
There’s been a lot of weird “it’s a second screen!” type devices called “Gemini” lately. Or maybe it’s always been that way but I just haven’t been paying attention. Either way, maybe they should lay off that for a while.
Right, I was thinking this looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember exactly why!
Yeah Gemini means twin, so two screens, but these screens are not exactly twins.
Twins are not necessarily identical.