The HP OMEN X 2S is the second laptop to be announced this week with a secondary screen. The Omen X 2S firmly focuses on the gaming market, while the ASUS Zenbook Pro Duo was pitched more at professions who occasionally game.
HP’s gaming lineup of products come under the OMEN brand and that means you get the full RGB backlit keyboard, insane RTX2080 (RTX2070 also available) graphics and a choose between 1080p or 4K resolution.
The primary display is a 15.6″ LED backlit display with an anti-glare coating. HP says they’re shipping with 144Hz refresh rate now, but that’ll get boosted to 240Hz in July.
The second display is a 5.98″ 1080p IPS multi-touch display running at 60Hz. The idea of this supplementary display is to deal with the multiple things gamers want to do today, like listening to music on Spotify, interacting with your community on Twitch or chatting with friends on Discord.
Like the ASUS implementation, the keyboard is moved down the body which means you will have to deal with no palm rest. At first, that really worried me, but then I looked down at my desk while writing this and noticed I don’t have a palm rest on my PC keyboard, so it’s likely a non-issue. You do have a change to the location of the trackpad, it’s now off to the side of the keyboard which may take some initial adjustment.
Unlike the ASUS display that runs the entire width of the chasis, HP have opted for the equivalent of an embedded phone in the center of the device. While less real-estate, it does have the bonus of consuming less battery life (and leaving your phone available for other tasks.
Multi-display laptops are an interesting trend in mid-2019, one that’ll certainly have to get support from Microsoft through Windows 10 to see the real benefits.
For more information about the HP OMEN X 2S, head to HP’s website.
