Hands-On With Intel’s Dual-Screen Honeycomb Glacier Gaming Prototype

Dual-screens are starting to become more common on laptops: see the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo launched here at Computex this week, for instance, and Intel is already planning out more prototypes. At a press event at show in Taipei, the company showed off Honeycomb Glacier, a laptop equipped for gaming with two screens stacked one on top of the other.

It uses a unique dual-hinge design that stays propped up at your angle of choice. The bottom hinge uses a clutch mechanism, and you have to press a button to fold it back down. The top hinge is a standard tension hinge that you’d see in any laptop. It feels a bit rickety, but I’d expect better ergonomics in a product meant for mass production.

As for specs, the parts are all off-the-shelf, including an eight core / 16 thread, 9th Gen H-series Intel processor (they said it doesn’t have a four-number SKU) and an overclocked Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. There’s a fair bit of room below the hinge, with a cooling apparatus to draw air against a custom motherboard to cool 175 watts of components, all with just one large fan. And despite just one fan, it measures 42 decibels. 

There’s a Tobii eye-tracker in the hinge, and though the software definitely still needs time in the oven, I can see it making it easier to manage the two displays. I was able to use it to move my gaze between multiple windows and type without clicking to switch between apps.

The 15.6-inch, FHD resolution top display is where one would put a game or their main application, while the bottom is a great spot for social media, chat applications or managing streaming. That bottom screen is actually an automotive display (like I said, they build it from off-the-shelf parts) that measures 12.3-inches diagonally.

Two-screen devices have typically made me skeptical, but for gaming and productivity, I could see something like this making sense, and I’m curious to see if any OEMs will make something similar.