CES 2009: N20 touchscreen laptop with 12 hours of battery

The N20 has got a 12-inch full touchscreen, which allows for multitouch input and all sorts of fancy-ness. In the press conference, they’ve demoed it with Google Earth and it’s pretty impressive – you can just swing the globe about with your fingers, double tapping for zoom etc. Photos are a good example of where multitouch becomes useful. Sadly though, the computer’s crashed, so it’s not something I’m going to be able to tell you about. When it works though, it’ll allow you to scroll, enlarge, reduce, pan and rotate.

Uniquely, there’s a LCD touchscreen where the mousepad would usually be. This works as an entirely different computer to the main 12-inch screen, although it shares the battery. The LCD screen is full of widgets for getting on the internet quickly.

The example they’ve given us is the ability to launch a movie and have it play on the small LCD screen, but then have it project and viewed on the main screen. This is how the battery life is extended – the main 12-inch screen CPU isn’t being used to view the movie, which is how they’re able to quote a really low power consumption on this model – they quote 12 hours of battery life.