Just the other day I was asking for more companies to do something a bit more wild with their gaming laptop designs. So out of nowhere, here’s HP with, of all things, a dual screen gaming laptop.
The Omen X 2S 15 isn’t a complete dual-screen laptop – you’ve still got a regular keyboard on the bottom half, instead of the virtual keyboard that some dual-screen devices have shown off.
Above the keyboard is a 5.98-inch 1080p touchscreen, designed to allow users to interact with Twitch chat, Discord, or Spotify. You can even use it as a separate second screen for viewing, much like that ASUS laptop that would let you browse the internet or watch videos through the touchpad.
There’s a lot of black space around either side of the touchpad – it’s not an especially wide touchscreen, so reading a lot of small text might be surprisingly difficult. You can also use the second screen to mirror part of the main screen, so if you wanted to just highlight, say, the radar in CS:GO, you could broadcast just that part of the screen. (It’s not totally seamless, since you’re broadcasting a portion of your screen and not individual HUD elements.)
But it’s a neat feature to have – hell, the fact that laptop manufacturers can implement things like this without running into severe thermal problems is cool.
And the specs are solid: configurations can go up to an i9-9880H octa-core CPU, an RTX 2070 or 2080 Max-Q GPU, a 1080p 144Hz screen with a 240Hz model available from July, G-SYNC variants, storage that ranges from a 512GB SSD with 32GB Optane memory up to RAID 0 1TB NVMe setups (!!!), and a max of 64GB DDR-3200MHz RAM in a 2.35kg unit.
There’s no Australian pricing as of yet, but the X 2S will retail for $US2099 internationally when it becomes available next month. That shakes out to just under $3100 locally, but with shipping and the Australia Tax(TM), we could be looking at something close to $4000. (Update 17/05: That’s exactly how much the X 2S will be, with HP confirming that the dual-screen laptop will retail for $3999 locally from July.) We’ll keep you posted when we know more, and hopefully I’ll get hands on with the device at Computex later this month if it’s floating around.
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