A Technology I'd Like To See (Short Take)

Touch pads have been around for awhile now. So have touch screens. The touch pad on my laptop is four and a quarter inches by two point five inches. This is actually larger than the screen on my Droid X phone. That in combination with a computer concept I saw at the Commodore computers web site got me to thinking, would there be any advantage to building laptops with touch screens rather than touch pads?

The above image shows the Commodore concept. The placement on the right wouldn't work for a laptop but the touch screen could just as easily be rotated ninety degrees to the right and moved below the keyboard where a touch pad would be.

A touch screen could be totally programmable. It could operate as a numeric keypad, a custom controller, a low end tablet, etc. Back-lit LCD's are responsible for a large percentage of the battery drain on laptops. The touch pad display could operate as a lower power alternative for light duty use when battery life is at a premium. Small screens on smartphones are a limitation but a lot of useful work gets done on them.

I'm not claiming that this is a good or even viable idea. I do think it's an interesting one though and it's not a bad platform to think about how a technology could lead to other products or how it might tie in with a larger strategy. For instance what if Apple built a laptop where the touch pad was an iPhone? There is a trend towards smart phones being people's primary computing devices. Using the smart phone as the touch pad on a laptop like keyboard/mouse combo would make for a nice and potentially elegant integration since there are just times when a full sized keyboard and display are not optional.