Intel shows laptop with extra screen made of electronic ink

Intel has shown a prototype of a laptop at IDF on which it has integrated a second screen based on an epaper display. The additional E-Ink screen is interactive, equipped with a touchscreen and a backlight.

The laptop in which Intel built the screen is an older Haswell laptop of Intel’s own design: the so-called reference design for Haswell. However, the technology will also be built into the reference design for the next generation of Skylake laptops, which will be made available to developers later this year. Skylake will follow up on the Broadwell laptops announced at IFA. In addition to its own reference design, the extra screen could also end up in laptops from manufacturers: Intel says it is in talks with manufacturers. The company cannot yet say what those are.

The prototype was used to show different usage scenarios of the second screen. In principle, any application can be sent to the second screen with the Share charm. However, Intel has also created several proprietary applications that give the user control over what is shown on the screen. For example, a dashboard with the weather, an RSS and Twitter feed can be shown, but it is also possible to display a customized Facebook app on the E-Ink screen. Intel also developed a translation application and arbitrary texts can be displayed.

The screen is purchased directly from E-Ink and, in addition to the epaper display, also contains a touchscreen and a backlight. That light can be turned on and off via the E-Ink screen. Since the screen is an epaper screen, ebooks can of course also be read. Even with the backlight switched on, the battery impact would be small: all the calculations are done on the processor, but for status updates from Twitter, RSS and Facebook, the system is only woken up from connected standby once every 15 minutes. Finally, Intel estimates that the cost of integrating the second display will be about $25 to $30.