Portable or Fold out laptop screens

I’ve been working on my laptop computer for a few months now. The screen is 1280 x 768. With todays suite of software almost every program has toolbars, panels or more leaving the main document area the size of a youtube video. While my laptop screen is wider than a single monitor it holds nothing to dual monitors. Having dual monitors in the past and then going to single monitors leaves much to be desired. So what solutions are available? None that I know of.

I have a couple of suggestions though. One would be to have a second monitor fold, flip or slide out. Although I doubt that it is impossible to have a full size second widescreen monitor with a laptop I don’t think that will happen anytime soon. I hope I’m wrong of course. What I’m thinking of is a second smaller fold out screen. Maybe with a minimum width of 200 to 300 with preferably the same height as the main screen.

What would you do with a secondary smaller screen? Use it for anything that isn’t the main application you are working on. Screen real estate is hard to come by. I can think of plenty of things. For example, all the panels and toolbars from programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc., mp3 music player, video player, instant messenger program, calculator, task manager, etc. There are plenty of applications that are around 200 to 400 pixels wide that would fit perfectly on a smaller second screen out of the way.

While its highly unlikely a laptop company will integrate this anytime soon I’m sure there would be a market for portable usb powered secondary lcd screens. Something that would attach to the right or left side of the laptop screen. I would be love to see something around 300w x 600h or a possible standard size like 480 x 640 (rotatable to 640 x 480). How cool would that be?