[relaxed jazz music]
[computer buzzes, beeps] - I've always admired
Toshiba's Libretto series, their range of subnotebook
PCs introduced in 1996. Librettos combined the best
parts of a palmtop and a laptop in a compromised but lovely little package, letting you have a proper Windows 95 PC in the palm of your hand. As fun as they could be though, they really were just shrunken
laptops with little I/O, and in the mid 2000s
the line was discontinued. However, Toshiba brought the
brand back once more in 2010. This time was something truly unique and with more compromises than ever. The Toshiba Libretto W100, an ultra-mobile PC sold for a limited time to mark Toshiba's 25th year
making portable computers. And it was heralded as the world's first dual touchscreen Windows
computer, which – yeah probably! Easy to claim it's the first to hit the regular consumer market, at least. There were pre-2010 dual screen prototypes and concepts that never went on sale, along with specialty products
like the 2006 Estari 2-VU that were mostly bought
by the US government. And the ASUS EeeBook Reader
that was planned for 2009 but seemingly never came out. Whatever was first, the dual touchscreen PC
category is poorly documented and is not a common configuration, especially in a handheld
subnotebook size. Acer made the Iconia 6120 in early 2011, but that Windows laptop was a beefy
thing with 14-inch touchscreens. And today we have machines like
the various ASUS ZenBooks and the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, but these are all significantly larger than a Libretto ever was. About the closest thing that comes to mind is Microsoft's Surface Duo, but that's an ARM-based
Android smartphone, not an x86 Windows PC. Even the Ayaneo Flip DS, while being a true Windows PC inside, doesn't have two matching
full-size screens. Amusing that they called it "the first ever dual
screen Windows handheld." It depends on your definition
of "handheld," I guess. The Libretto W100 does away with traditional physical inputs. There's no keyboard or
mouse, not even a stylus, just two 7-inch touchscreens
with haptic feedback. Back in 2010, this led to
it primarily being compared to tablets and ebook readers like the iPad and the Kindle and the upcoming Blackberry Playbook. But each of those were their own platform running a customized OS, whereas the Libretto ran the full desktop version of Windows 7. And although the multitasking
potential was exciting, it cost more than twice
the amount of any tablet, so skepticism was understandable. $1,099.99 was what it cost to order one from Toshiba
in the US in 2010. And from what I can tell, that was it. There were no customization
options or upgrades. Consumers got one
configuration, and that's all. And being that it was a
25th anniversary thing and the final Libretto model, it's no surprise Toshiba sold out fast. Not too many were manufactured and it was available for
a very short time online being announced in June
and being gone by that October. You could say the price
matched its exclusive status, but no matter what, it was expensive. 15-inch Windows laptops
cost between $400-$600, less than half the cost
for better overall specs, just no touchscreen. And for something closer in size, a netbook cost $300 or less, offering similar performance, more ports, and a real keyboard. Now of course, the whole
point of the W100 was that dual touchscreen setup, so who cares? It looks like the future and
you can't put a price on that. And for its "priceless" $1,100, you've got a nifty little box of goodies. Starting with an assortment of accessories and documentation, including
the 19 volt power adapter with a US-style cord connected. The rest of this seems to be European, as evidenced by things like the CD-ROM with its Cyrillic lettering. Also included is this quick start guide with its two sides covering
the guided quickness of starting in the form of a guide. Along with an instruction manual, packing a couple hundred
black and white pages of facts and figures, setup and troubleshooting tips, and how to use a touchscreen in case you forgot how fingers work. Also in the box is this delightful leatherette storage thing, debossed with Toshiba Libretto branding. An uncommon style of premium-feeling protective carrying case
with a red velour interior for the computer to
snugly slide inside of. There's nowhere to
store the power adapter, so you'll still want a bag on the go, making me doubt its practicality, but hey, you can store it on
a bookshelf like a weirdo. So that's something. And of course there's the computer itself, a tidy clamshell design that unfolds into a beautiful little slab of handheld computing goodness. On launch, it was often compared to a thicker, wider Nintendo DS. And while I don't have one of those, I do have the newer 2DS XL, which is even larger than the
DS or even 3DS was in 2010. But the Libretto W100 is even larger still with its twin seven inch screens compared to the XL's 4.88 and 4.1-inchers. It's also a much higher resolution, with a native 1024x600 on
each capacitive TFT LCD. And it weighs just a little over one and a half pounds on its own, with the battery adding another five and a half ounces on top of that. The normal battery anyway, there was a heavier high capacity pack that took battery life from two
hours up to a possible four. Nothing to write home about either way. Oh, and under the battery is another sign of this being a European W100, which, by the way, you may
sometimes see called the W105. And to my knowledge, that
was the business variant, whereas mine is the consumer one. Same core specs on both, but some also had a SIM slot on top for cellular communication. Mine doesn't have it. It does have this though, a slot for microSD cards up to 16 gigs. Netbooks often had an SD MMC slot, but I haven't seen microSD before. The lid holes don't stop there either. There are also cooling vents
and fan grills scattered around since most of the hardware
is packed behind the lid. On the right hand side
is the power connector and an indicator for wireless modes. The rear has no ports at all, just a big hinge for the two screens. And the left side has
the machine's only I/O, a headphone jack, and one USB 2.0 port. That's it. If you need anything more, I hope you're all about that dongle life or embrace Bluetooth 2.1. Otherwise you're limited to
those touchscreens for input. The only buttons on the
thing are one for power, one for bringing up a virtual keyboard, and this home button, acting as a multifunction
software shortcut key. And there's also a webcam with microphone built
into the top screen bezel, a sad little 1.02 megapixel thing with a microphone that sounds like this... But hey, at least you get the
full 32-bit desktop version of Windows 7 Home Premium. [computer starting up] Unfortunately though, it's the full desktop version
of Windows 7 Home Premium! A great OS on a nicely-specced system, but a chore to use and a sluggish ballsack of an operating environment
on the Libretto W100. For starters, it's running a 1.2 gigahertz Intel Pentium U5400, one of their consumer ultra
low voltage processors, and it's paired with two gigabytes of 800 megahertz DDR3 RAM, the maximum supported configuration here. So you run into the issue
netbooks often did back then where you wanted an OS newer than XP, but we're stuck with less than
ideal hardware for the job. Now, it's still notably
better than an Intel Atom, and it does at least
utilize a 62 gig mSATA SSD, so it doesn't chug as much as it could, but it's still prone to
lagging and throttling and going nuts with the thermals. And the aluminum top lid acts
as a conductive heat spreader, making the whole upper
half toasty to the touch. It's nice that the bottom
remains rather cool, sat on your lap at least, with only the battery warming up a bit. But man, that lid just
roasts no matter what you do. And its little high RPM cooling
fans never stop wailing. [fans blowing] But even if the hardware
was 10 times faster, Windows 7 is still a poor choice here because it's a desktop OS and this is a dedicated
touchscreen device, dual touchscreens at that. So all the annoyances of using a non-touch-optimized
interface are doubled. And even with Toshiba's custom software, it just sucks to use. Heck, I don't even like using touch on modern Windows laptops either. For touchscreen devices to be decent, they need a UX designed for touch, properly taking into
account the difference between a mouse cursor and a human finger. Stock Windows 7 simply
doesn't provide that. All of that being said though, I have certainly had worse experiences with full desktop versions
of Windows being crammed onto a tablet style touchscreen
device in the past. So it could be worse, but yeah, it could still be better. In fact, if it had
something like Windows 8 that would've been better, with its metro interface
or whatever they called it and the tiles, and just more
touchable kind of design, but it's Windows 8, would you really wanna put that on here? And besides that came out
a couple years after this, so it wasn't even an
option when this was made. Now, was there a Linux
distribution of some kind that's touch optimized for
systems of this generation? I'm not aware of one. If there is, let me know. I'd be kind of curious to see that. But just standard Windows
7 being treated really as an extended display, just two displays on top of each other
as if you have two monitors. Because that's what it is, and Windows sees it as two monitors. That's all it's doing. And so if you want,
you can actually change the way that this works. Like, if you wanted to do it side by side, it freaks things out. You know, for instance, if you wanna just clone the two displays, or have them, come on now,
duplicated across both. [laughs] There you go. Yeah. Anyway, let's put that back. It's also important to note that you can really just
touch one screen or another. You can't do both at the same time because it really is just one large desktop we're
working with here effectively. And the mouse and
keyboard are both treated or both function like it's just an application
being touched by a mouse. So really the mouse
cursor goes from up here to being down here. So you can't like keep the mouse up here and adjust the keyboard down here. No, it's gonna go back and forth. You also get these
different keyboard layouts, so you have that right there. This with way more keys, but of course makes everything smaller. It's nice to have your
Function and Alt and stuff. And you have this split
design, which is kind of cool. Actually a couple of those. And if you press this,
I think twice, yeah, this brings up like a virtual touch pad. Again, it's kind of odd though. Now you see like there's just the mouse cursors moving
around sort of independently. And then sometimes, if you tap down here, it'll treat it like the
mouse cursor is clicking and moving down here because
it's also treating this part as a mouse like separately, it really doesn't work well. One thing that is really nice are the keyboard haptics. There's a bit of a delay sometimes, but it's actually, especially when you're
holding it handheld, I'm not doing that here just because of the video recording, but you know, when you do it like this, it feels genuinely quite good, again, except for the lag. Sometimes it's a little bit laggy, but the haptics are actually pretty nice. Now, it's still not an
amazing experience, of course, I would very much prefer even a basic, kind of crappy netbook keyboard to this. You know, even these with the EBC, with the teeny little
keys that I don't like, I still prefer having
even those than this. You do often run into
presses not happening. Yeah, if you type too fast or if you don't hit exactly
in the center of the keys. Now, another mouse quirk here is you don't actually have right click. So you have to do this hold down and then secondary tap to bring up the right click. Or you can go to this Pen
and Touch Control Panel here. You've got all these options, flicks and pseudo-gestures and handwriting recognition, [mumbles] a bunch of things. Some of 'em work better than others, but you have this right here,
this touch pointer option. If you enable that, you have this mouse overlay that pops up. So, instead of having to
hold and then tap again, you can just click that right
mouse button virtually there, it pops up every time you
do anything with the mouse. So it's kind of annoying.
Sometimes it gets in the way. I kind of prefer the other way of just the tap and then duh-deh-da. But yeah, you got options. The accuracy is quite
nice, pretty responsive. Sometimes you get a
little bit of weirdness where it'll lose it if there's
not enough surface area. For instance, if you're just
doing a fingernail over, it won't do it. You have to kind of give
it more of a surface area. It also means using a capacitive pen just doesn't do anything. Like this is just one that I use on my different touchscreen devices, phones, tablets, my
touchscreen, other laptops. Nope, doesn't do anything. You have to kind of use
the thicker side here, if you have one of those, closer to a finger basically. And that still doesn't do anything, but if you press down so
there's enough surface area, eventually it'll kinda work. Yeah, it really does just want a finger. As for some of the Toshiba software, you have this home
button, you can press that and that'll bring up this Toshiba board that does various things. So just a bunch of shortcuts really to the sponsors that they have going on. You got your users guide,
some driver updates, diagnostic security, that whole deal. Also saw this bulletin board
a lot in the press photos. I guess they were pretty happy with this, but I just don't like
these type of things. What is that? Why is that
popping up? I don't know. But yeah, it's one of those where you can just add
like notes and stuff and just put a bunch of things down here while you're working on
something else up here. Okay. I don't know, I just, I find these things a million times more finicky and kind of annoying
to use rather than just physical notes out on your desk. What's wrong with real Post-It notes. I don't want virtual ones down here. It's just kind of annoying. And of course, Toshiba included all kinds of other applications. So a whole bunch of things in here. I hate navigating the start menu on this. So yeah, Bluetooth
applications, CD and DVD, even though it doesn't
have any of those drives. Media controller, just
generic playback kind of stuff and different utilities. Dang it. Nope. There we go. Eh, I'm gonna plug in a mouse. We know how it works with
the fingers at this point. I'm so tired of fingering this thing. Oh, it feels so much better. Right. So then the utilities here. Eco utility for battery saving, face recognition is interesting. So it actually uses, you
know, just the camera there to have you log in using your face. Oh man, how fascinating
for the time. [laughs] Flashcards is just for managing
the microSD that's in there, but of course you can do that straight up through Windows as well. This is an odd one. HDD SSD alert, all it says
is "Your SSDs working." [laughs] If it's not, I guess
it'll tell you it's not. But yeah, most of this is pretty generic. About the only thing else to
show is this Book Place deal, and this is their ebook
reader type of thing, which again, the press were
talking about quite a bit. It goes into this
vertical mode, of course. I don't know if these are
just example freebie books or things you could buy or something. I'm assuming there were
some purchasing options somewhere in here, but you can bring up the user manual and the quick start guide and whatnot. Let's bring up one of these, I don't know, "Grilling Basics." [laughs] Yeah, so I was thinking that this would be a little more optimized for this particular setup, like having Windows or
parts of the interface properly split between the two screens. But no, it's just expanding
it fully across here. Like any other program really. Man, it is so hot across the back of here. But yeah, you can see it's
not particularly great. Like fullscreen mode
is a little bit better since you don't have that
Windows interface going on, but you still have this stuff down here and then your start
menu is still over here. It's just, it's so awkward. Ugh. I don't even know how to
get out of it at this point, so we're just gonna
Control + Alt + Delete, which you do by holding down the keyboard button for a while, and it's vertical. I just have to restart. Like I don't even have
a start menu anymore. This is the crap you run into
all the time using this thing. It seems like every application breaks something in a new way. It's a fascinatingly annoying experience. So what exactly is ideal on
here in terms of use cases? Well, pretty much the
main thing that I saw mentioned over and over in old
reviews is the multitasking. So like, watching a
video on the top window or the top screen and then having some
reading material down below. Yeah, I mean it's fully
capable of doing that, surprisingly so. Even running YouTube in
the edge browser here, you pretty much limited it like 360 or 480p really for running YouTube videos. But it's surprisingly
decent, or tolerable, compared to a lot of
crappy Intel Atom machines, at least in regards to basic productivity and things like that, which is really what it's designed for. If you start doing anything with gaming and 3D acceleration, ah, there's
a bit of a different story. So I've got a DirectX 10
benchmark gonna be running here. 3D Mark Vantage obviously. Yeah, I know this is not made for this, but just kinda curious, right? I know I am. And the answer is... I mean it wasn't gonna be great, but it doesn't even open this, it just gets stuck on "creating shaders" every time I've tried this. Oops. It's unfortunately
encountered an unexpected problem. I'll say. Problem is
it doesn't do anything. I forgot to even say what we had in here. It's just some intel integrated
graphics of some kind, whatever's in this
Pentium chip set going on sharing between 64 and 728 megs. I'm assuming it takes
that from System RAM. You'd think DOS box would
be just fine, right? Well, it does actually load
up and all that kind of deal. We can move around and
whatnot with our arrow keys. Eh, it's kind of playable Control holds down there
because it's treated as a toggle button, so
you just kind of press it and it eventually will stop. No, it actually doesn't. I thought it did. But yeah, it stops whenever
you press another button and surprisingly the arrow keys actually, sort of function how you
would think you'd be able to, like you can hold up or
back, and left and right. You are able to just
press, I think two at once. That's the maximum multi-touch on here. But yeah, it's the toggle for like Control and
Alt, that kinda sucks. Let's try full screen here now. Alright, now here's where
things get a little bit weird and by that I mean it doesn't work at all. Yeah. Like the keyboard
went away entirely. I dunno what, well, okay, there it is. Let's go back into, can we
get back into fullscreen? Nope, try that. Yeah, no it gets real wonky whenever you run pretty
much anything in fullscreen. It's a bit of an issue for games. Perfectly fine for your standard
mouse controlled things. In fact, it's actually
pretty darn pleasant for stuff like Solitaire,
or Bejeweled or whatever. You know, I don't dislike this at all. Wish things were a little
bit bigger in terms of scale, but hey, it's about as good as it gets. Another kind of ideal situation here. Well, nevermind. What the heck is going on with the mouse? I guess it's good now. [laughs] Okay, well an most ideal situation. Yeah, games like
Rollercoaster Tycoon here. Because yeah, it's a more or less fully mouse driven experience. So, there we go. Yeah, place all the burger bars you want. Soda drink stalls. Perfect. Yeah, it seems to play just fine now, once it figured out what's going on, of course it really freaks the heck out if you do anything down here, so just pretend this doesn't exist. But then you run pretty
much anything else. Quake III here, like yeah, doesn't know what the heck
to do at all with the mouse. It does work with this mouse. But if we go into an actual game here. Yeah, that's what happens
when you try to move. [laughs] Because this down here, all these controls for the keyboard or
whatever are the mouse. And so it thinks I'm basically moving the mouse really rapidly in
a bottom right kind of way, because that's effectively
the mouse cursor and clicking down in the bottom right
quadrant of the screen. And so, you really need to
plug in a physical keyboard and a physical mouse in order
to play something like that. It's possible though. And about the newest
thing that I've gotten to kind of run on here is Minecraft. Specifically one from 2010 or 11ish, one of the beta versions that
would've been more appropriate for this back in the day. 'Cause I saw some old coverage mention that they tried it on
here when it was new. Bring open the virtual keyboard here, and it's incredibly slow and sluggish. My goodness. That is awful. And this is the very lowest settings, too. But again, you run into this issue where if you try to actually move
using the virtual keyboard, it thinks that you're moving the mouse to the bottom right and clicking, you just gotta have a physical keyboard in order to do anything in terms of games, which this
is not really designed to do. So I guess you can't really blame it. That is not what this is for. And something it does feel
like it's almost made to do. Nintendo DS emulation, we got the dual screen thing going on, so I've got the DeSmuME
or whatever the heck, I don't know, it's just a
emulator that seemed like it would work in Windows
7 with these specs. What happened to my mouse cursor? It's a little wonky. Obviously this emulator
is not optimized for this, the interface or anything about it, but yeah, it actually kind of works. Didn't mean to press that but... Well, [laughs] I spoke too soon. I'm gonna try one more thing here that I was testing out earlier, I was having some issues with, I don't think I had all the buttons mapped or, well, I didn't have a
keyboard to press the buttons. Yeah, Sim City DS, which works just fine here with the menu, but eh, you know, it's a little iffy once you
get into the actual game. Okay, build a power plant. And the sound is just turned off right now 'cause it's so sluggish
even without sound, that adding it makes it
just that much worse. Half the time the inputs
just don't respond at all, then they do and it's like catching up and speeding up and slowing down. The fan's going crazy. Anyway, this machine isn't made for this, but you can do it and
it's just kind of cool. Yeah, another little nifty
thing that this came with, I almost forgot about this. Yeah, this Libretto piano program. [piano keys playing] Yeah, kind of neat. Unfortunately that
limitation of just being able to press in two places
at once gets in the way. So yeah, only two note polyphony here, but you know, got some
different voices and things. Charming demo, that's all that is. That's about it for the
Libretto W100 I guess. Obviously there's all sorts of
things you could try on here, but results are wonky,
especially with games, but it is not a gaming machine. It was never supposed to be really for anything other than
basic internet browsing and email and office stuff. That's about it. And it's pretty clear from
the design of the whole thing. It's one of those devices that they did because they could do it, rather than they should. And why not? It was Toshiba's 25th anniversary of making little laptops
and portables and things. So they were excited to
just put out something cool and that's what we got,
in very small numbers. A limited edition novelty,
kind of technological toy for the well-off nerd or business person or whatever kind of weirdo decided to buy this thing back in the day for a lot of money. You just have to really
be into the novelty to choose the W100 over
pretty much anything else. You know, even netbooks, which were unfancy and slow and just bleh, but they were far better in terms of usability and productivity than this Libretto W100 is. At least until you start
plugging in external peripherals and then by the time you do that, it's no longer the dual screen
touch-only wonder that it is, or hoped to be, or tried to be. The ambition here in the experimentation is what I most admire. Anyway, if you've ever used
one of these Libretto W100s, let me know what your experiences were, what you did with it, what happened to it. It's just that it's fascinating to me that this dual touchscreen idea was even hitting the
market in 2010 at all. It's still such a niche
design and form factor. Again, if you've ever used one of these or even a modern dual touchscreen device, lemme know your thoughts in the comments. It's a fascinating
subcategory of computing and I hope you enjoyed
taking a look at it with me. If you did, then do stick around. I have more LGR things
coming soon on tech, both the old and not so old, and as always, thank you
very much for watching.
