Amazon.com will be the original landing site of the gScreen Spacebook 005, a dual-screen laptop developed by gScreen Computer.
The Spacebook appears to be the first mainstream offering from the Anchorage, Alaska-based company, which began in 2003 with a focus on developing dual-screen laptops for filmmakers, photographers, CAD engineers, and video and graphics designers, and has since received interest from bankers, accountants, traders and branches of the military.
While the idea of a dual-screen laptop remains novel, other PC makers are experimenting with this type of form factor. In January, Lenovo made a splash at the 2009 CES Expo with the ThinkPad W700ds, a mobile workstation with a main 17-inch display and a secondary 10.6-inch screen.
The gScreen Spacebook features a full-size keyboard and two 15.4-inch LED backlit display screens; one appears to slide out from behind the other. The resolution of the screens is unknown, but given their intended audiences, an impressive resolution is likely.
What gScreen has revealed is that the Spacebook will include a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 processor and either a Nvidia GeForce 9800GT chip with 512MB of dedicated memory or a Nvidia Quadro FX 1700M graphics chip with 512MB of dedicated memory.
It will run Windows Vista or Win XP Pro, have 4GB of RAM (two 2GB DDR2 SO-DIMM), a 320GB, 7,200-rpm hard drive and a nine-cell battery. And there’ll be an IEEE 1394 1 graphics card output, an HDMI slot, microphone and headphone slots, and a PCI Express Card slot.
In the fourth quarter of 2009 it’ll ship from the United States to 29 countries, and a few months later will be available from Amazon.com sites in Canada, Japan, the U.K., Germany and France. Eventually, Buy.com and Newegg.com are also expected to be retailers.
Pricing has not been announced, though it is rumored at $3,000. And, according to the gScreen blog, once the 15.4-incher is out, a 13.3-incher will be in the works. With the two screens expanded, the Spacebook 003 will offer 24 inches of screen from a 13.3-inch laptop. Go, Alaska.
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