There have been a number of weird laptop designs over the years. From the “ebook”, LG's badly named laptop, which runs on liquid fuel rather than a rechargeable battery, to ThinkPad's 755, whose screen can be removed and put on an overhead projector, laptop designers have tried a number of strange things to make their laptop stand out.
Perhaps the most strange of these odd designs is the Xentex Flip-pad Voyager, a 2002 laptop that is one of the largest laptops that any manufacturer has tried to get away with building. The Voyager is a full 19.5 inches wide by 14 inches tall when unfolded, and it sports dual 13.3 inch displays that are fully maneuverable in any direction. Yes, that's right: this laptop has two screens, each of which is usable with separate keyboards as two computers.
Just in case your eyes merely scanned over the nineteen and a half inch width s-tat, it may be worth it to clarify just how big this monster is. Not only does it sport a full-size keyboard, but also a numbers keypad on one side and a function-key 5x5 grid on the other. This means there are 23 keys across the top of the keyboard. Compare that to the keyboard you use on your desktop machine, and you may start to get an idea of just how big this laptop really is.
At twelve and a half pounds, it's a little heavy to use as a real mobile laptop, but perhaps this can be forgiven due to the fact that two people can use it simultaneously. And since both the screens and the keyboard portions fold in half, the laptop can be folded over twice, making it take up much less space when carrying it along. In fact, when folded up completely, the Voyager is actually much smaller than laptops that come in at half the width.
The Voyager's initial press releases from 2002 seem to indicate that it's aimed at a presentation crowd. Dual display connectors allow it to have four screens simultaneously, which is way more extreme than any other laptop before or since. It's unclear how well these sold, but the fact that almost no one remembers them today is proof enough that they didn't sell very well on the open market.
With an 850Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM, this computer certainly isn't strong enough to do much of anything in today's processing power heavy world. But the games of one-on-one Doom matches on this machine were probably epic. If you want to recreate the experience, though, make sure you have a floppy drive to install with.
If you really do want one, you may have quite a search on your hands. It's a bit difficult to find one on the market these days. In late 2008, an unbootable Flip-pad Voyager sold on eBay for $99. On the one hand, that seems a bit expensive for a laptop case that doesn't even boot up. But then again, it seems pretty cheap for a weird laptop design that'll surely be a great conversation piece.
