Touchscreens on notebooks

So touchscreens on notebooks never made much sense to me, because of, well, gorilla arms. Think about how most people use their phones or tablets and you'll realize that the screen tends to be more horizontal than vertical, which is the opposite of what occurs on a notebook. Actually most things that you interact extensively with your fingers/hands tend to be horizontal. Perhaps those of you who are fans of touchscreen laptops will disagree, but I still find it to be more of a gimmick than useful.

But that got me thinking, why can't you have a horizontal touchscreen on a laptop? Why not turn the entire palmrest area into a touchscreen?

Instead of a huge wasted space in the form of a palm rest, you'd have a touchscreen that could function as a palmrest, second screen, huge touchpad, or touchscreen. The trick of course is to get it to transition seamlessly between these functions.

To me this makes a lot of sense. Certain interactions and interfaces function better with touch, while others function better with mouse/keyboard. Instead of try to cram everything into one interface (*cough*windows8*cough*), you could have the best of both worlds.

Imagine using a music player on your palmscreen while you surf the internet on the main screen. Or palmrest could display system stats while you're gaming. Or surfing stackoverflow on your palmscreen while coding in your favorite IDE. Or even within a single app you could have multiple interfaces, e.g. in office the ribbon interface could go into the touchscreen and that'd free up realestate for real work.

There's no question there'd need to be a lot of engineering on both the hardware and software side to get this to work well, but to me this would be killer feature on a notebook. Am I crazy or do other people think this is a great idea as well? How do we convince OEMs to start working on this?

 

I agree that touch screens are 99.99% useless on notebooks (for me).

Are you crazy? Nah. But the idea you propose has already been tried since at least 2011 (dual screens... can't remember the notebook model) and certainly didn't catch on.


I found it.

See:
Acer ICONIA 6120 Dual-Screen Touchbook - 14 - Core i5 480M - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit - 4 GB RAM - 640 GB HDD review - CNET


Sure, not exactly as you stated, but in a way 'better'. To me; more useless than ever.

To interact with a computer efficiently I need a decent enough screen, an excellent keyboard and an equally excellent pointing device (touchpads need not apply). ThinkPad's (for my workflows) have met those requirements for three decades and counting so far.

 

I was chatting with a Dell representative online yesterday, complaining about the fact that their Precision M3800 series only comes with a touchscreen, which means glossy and I really hate glossy screens.
I told them they should let people pick the kind of screen (especially on Pro series) like on the M2800 or M4800 series.
She said probably people ask for touchscreen.

I don't know anybody who uses is computer to work who needs a touchscreen...

That was just my 2 cents to say I don't like touchscreens on laptops, especially because that make them glossy.