Image: AliExpress
Multi-screen laptops are a thing, and have been a thing for a while. I vividly remember the ThinkPad W700DS, which had a pull-out, secondary screen years before people started packing USB monitors in their bags. But what about a laptop with a secondary touchscreen, in a convenient place, and a lot smaller than any similar design I’ve seen?
The SZBox DSX156 uses a standard 15.6-inch 1080p screen up top, plus a 7-inch touchscreen to the left of the keyboard on the bottom. Again, this isn’t a new idea—we’ve seen the secondary touchscreen on a couple of laptops, like one of Lenovo’s ThinkBook offshoots or the Asus Zephyrus Duo. But both of those are fairly beefy designs, much closer to a “workstation” than a standard laptop. This one crams the secondary functionality into a laptop that’s shockingly normal-sized and just 1.6 kilograms (3.53 pounds), and I can see how touch-friendly apps on the secondary screen would make sense.
AliExpress
Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be checking it out. There are several red flags for this design, which Liliputing says is now on its second revision. One, the dimensions don’t make sense. A full-sized ANSI keyboard is about 11 inches wide, while a 15.6-inch 1080p screen is 13.6 inches wide. Based on those dimensions and the 7-inch 1280×800 touchscreen (5.6 inches wide without adding in the bezel), and accounting for the 357mm/14-inch total width, it seems like the keyboard on the DSX156 must be very squished, like something sized for a small tablet. (This is why the ThinkBook that had a roughly similar layout was over 17 inches on the primary screen.)
Based on the specs listed at AliExpress, it’s also pretty light on power, with an Intel N100 processor and a single slot for DDR4 RAM that I wouldn’t trust to handle that secondary touchscreen at the same time as Windows 11. A 5,400mAh battery is tiny for any laptop, let alone for one with two screens—that’s the size of a phone battery—so I think it might be a typo. (Maybe 54 watt-hours?) At least it’s affordable, showing as $425.12 at the time of this writing… but that’s without RAM, storage, or an operating system.
Still, the fact that this exists seems to indicate that we can fit bigger secondary screens in smaller laptops, if not without compromise. I think it’s worth investigating if you happen to be a laptop maker looking for ways to make a new model stand out from the crowd.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he’s the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop “battlestation” in his off hours. Michael’s previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he’s covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he’s always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.