Gadgetory

- Last week, Intel invited us to its design labs to check out the Honeycomb Glacier. It's a dual-screen design that Intel believes could be the future of gaming laptops. PC makers have been toying with this idea for years, stuffing screens into the touchpad or grafting additional monitors onto the main display, like a set of unwieldy wings. But in the real world, secondary screens haven't really caught on. The only example I can think of is Apple's MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and I rarely hear anyone admit to using and appreciating that narrow strip of touchscreen above the keyboard. The people I know who bought one did 'cause it's the only way to get the most powerful processors. So what makes Intel's prototype any different? For starts, it's got a genuinely usable amount of screen real estate above that keyboard. This isn't just a context-sensitive button panel like Apple's Touch Bar, it's a bona fide 12.3-inch mini monitor with enough space to drop your Slack and Discord chat window or your Twitch streaming setup. It could be your entire timeline when you're scrubbing through footage or stitching clips in Adobe Premiere. And unlike a screen built into your touchpad or keyboard deck, you don't have to keep bobbing your head and changing your focus between your main monitor and your secondary screen. Intel designed a clever hinge that uses a tiny one-way roller clutch to let you effortlessly prop up both screens at any angle and just push a button when it's time to fold them back down. The hinge doesn't make for the sleekest laptop, but it makes more sense to me than always having to look down. Then there's my favorite feature, a Tobii eye-tracking camera that lets you dart your eyes to any window on your secondary screen to automatically focus on it. So you can immediately chat with friends and co-workers without alt + tabbing out of your game or having to swipe a mouse all the way over to your second monitor. And because some pro gamers use Tobii to literally track where their head's at during a game, Intel decided to stick a heart rate sensor right here to give those training sessions another useful metric. Mind you, not all of this works brilliantly quite yet. Intel built this as a prototype, using off-the-shelf parts, including a screen sourced from the automotive world. That's why the bezels are so much bigger here. It's why the cool Tobii eye-tracking monitor switching idea is currently confined to a simple demo. It's why there's no damn mouse buttons on this trackpad, and it's probably why the PC stutters when I try to play a basic game, because there's actually a fair amount of processing power under this hood. A 9th Gen, 45W, eight-core Intel CPU overclocked to 60W, with Intel GeForce GTX 1060 graphics (Correction: This should say Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060.) also overclocked to 95W. Similar to the Asus Zephyrus, with that fancy compartment that opens to allow additional air inside, Intel's Honeycomb Glacier has a special cooling solution that fits underneath that dual hinge screen, one with a fan that naturally draws air through a compartment whose chips have been expressly laid out for maximum cooling efficiency. So hey, you know Intel's a chipmaker, not a laptop designer, so there's a chance this'll never come out. You'll never be able to buy one, at least in this shape and form. Perhaps manufacturers will take pieces of the design, though, like the dual hinges and the secondary screen, and those could be part of your future gaming laptops. But unusually, Intel says there's enough interest in this exact design from PC makers that you might actually see it come out. Until then, it's a cool idea to think about. Hey, thanks for watching, and I've got a question for you: if you've got a dual-screen setup right now, say a couple desktop monitors, a laptop and external monitor, or even a laptop and a tablet, does this seem like a more effective solution to you? Let me know in the comments below.