DuoScreen wants to give your laptop monitor a sidekick

News
By published

The desktop has so many advantages over the laptop: power, price, multiple monitors. A powerful gaming laptop has the advantage of portability, but we hate giving up the productivity of two (or three) side-by-side monitors. So do the creators of a soon-to-be Kickstarter called the DuoScreen, apparently: they've built a prototype laptop dock that, true to its name, houses a fold-out second screen.

The prototype laptop dock, designed for a 15-inch notebook, includes some bottom ventilation and straps and rubber pads to keep the laptop from sliding around. Though DuoScreen's concept renders all show it paired with a MacBook Pro, DuoScreen co-founder Nicholas Greco told me over email that it was built to support any 15-inch laptop. He also sent over some photos of the prototype in use.

DuoScreen's 15.6-inch 1600x900 screen is shy of 1080p, but it runs off USB (for both power and video) like other similar external portable monitors. The support bar the screen is mounted on can swing to either the left or right side of the notebook and swivel 180 degrees to switch from productivity tool to presentation aid.

DuoScreen hasn't talked about pricing yet, but we expect that information to show up when the dock launches on Kickstarter. Our big concern is weight. 15-inch laptops are heavy enough by themselves. Will adding a second screen be worth a few more pounds of baggage?

DuoScreen's Kickstarter goes live on September 10.

Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).