DUO – Double Your Laptop Screen Real Estate With This Foldable Monitor

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by Olaf von VossJuly 3^rd, 2018

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More pixels are always better than less pixels, right? Meet DUO, a second screen for your laptop, by Mobile Pixels. Their Kickstarter campaign is extremely sucessful, maybe because their product is extremely useful. let’s check it out!

Sitting in front of  a giant workstation with a host of monitors will boost your productivity, no doubt. But many freelancers (have to) work quite a bit while on the road, with only their laptop handy. Does this diminish productivity, then? Not if you choose to back the so-called DUO screen by Mobile Pixels on Kickstarter.

DUO – Dual-Screen Laptop Monitor

What I normally do if I’m on-the-go and I need to work on my laptop (especially video editing, since these NLEs tend to eat up a lot of screen real estate) is to take my iPad with me, too. Because as always, there’s an app for that: Duet (link). With it, your iPad becomes a second screen for your Macbook. But now there’s a new kid in town, and it plays with both Macs and Windows laptops: DUO. Check out the Kickstarter video below for an overview:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/747287659/duo-the-on-the-go-dual-screen-laptop-monitor

The idea seems to be pretty simple, indeed. DUO is a foldable second screen for any laptop. Just attach it to the back of your existing one and slide it out once you need some additional pixels. DUO connects via a single USB-C cable to the host computer and the two founders of Mobile Pixels claim that it won’t drain your laptop’s battery too much.

Features

The whole unit weights 1.5 lbs and features a 12.5″ IPS screen. That way it will fit almost any laptop, no matter of the original screen size of that given laptop. The panel itself offers 300 nits and a resolution of 1080p which is fine for all kinds of office tasks as well as some non-critical video or photo work. For finishing a major project one should sit at that aforementioned giant workstation, I guess. The DUO screen folds out of a plastic hard cover and it can be swiveled by 270°. You can even rotate it around by 180° in order to present the content of your screen to your client/co-worker/friend. You can attach DUO to your laptop so that the screen folds out on either the right hand side or on the left hand side of your laptop monitor.

The screen works with a custom driver, which is available for macOS, Microsoft Windows and Linux. This driver converts the USB signal to eDP (Display Port), therefore only one USB connection is needed for both power and the video signal itself. The whole product is pretty straight forward. It’s affordable (179$), it’s super simple to use, you can easily swap this foldable screen from one laptop to another. DUO can be set to “expand” in order to extend your screen or to “mirror” in order to copy the content of your laptop screen to this second screen.

Pricing and Availability

The Kickstarter campaign runs until July 24th and by the time of writing this article  2.286 backers funded a total of $450.207 (1286% funded). One DUO is $179 (early bird) or $189 (regualr price during the Kickstarter campaign). With one DUO you’ll get two sets of magnets and an optional stand for placing DUO directly on a table for an additional $15.

If everything goes smoothly, the first DUO should be shipping your way in January 2019 and if something goes wrong.. well.. this is still a Kickstarter campaing, not an online shop.

DUO seems to be a kind of simple, yet very neat product which has some potential of increasing your productivity without adding too much bulk to your laptop and without being crazy expensive. Well done!

Links: Kickstarter campaign | mobilepixels.com

Would you back such a product? Let us know in the comments below!