HP Omen X 2S shows you can never have too many screens
Laptops
I'm a firm believer in the, you can never have too many screens rule.
And that's one of the things that makes HP Omen X 2S gaming laptop stand out in a really crowded field of 15-inch models with GeForce 2080 Max-Q graphics, and an Intel i7-9750H processor.
It puts a six inch 1080p touchscreen just above the keyboard for watching a screen, chatting, listening to music, killing time waiting for a match, or monitoring your system stats via the command center.
In other words, to replace tasks you probably currently use your phone for.
For long gaming, to Windows it looks just like a second monitor, which means you can drag any window down to it and display any type of content, which is great, and the secondary screen is bright and crisp with a decent viewing angle, but to watch video or read messages you have to pretty much loom over the keyboard, which isn't the same as being able to tilt a phone or tablet to put it anywhere you want in your line of sight It's not as bad as I expected though.
The occasional loon to check slack or discord provided a nice backstretch and it really is perfect for monitoring system stats, or monitoring a web conference that you really want to pay much attention to.
One of the unique capabilities HP adds to the mix is screen mirroring, which lets you pin and magnify a section of the screen.
It's a lot less useful than it sounds, though.
To set it up, you run the game and draw a rectangle around the area of the screen you wanna mirror.
It uses the coordinates of that rectangle to pull the contents from that area in the graphics memory and display it on the second screen.
If the area you've selected is smaller than the second screen, then it gets scaled up to fill, which essentially magnifies But it doesn't work with first person shooters, so no mini maps.
You don't really benefit from the small amount of magnification given that you're moving it out of easy view and you're not saving any space in the game.
In fact, if you relocate the section you're marrying, such as swapping the map in the shop and don't have to, you have to redefine the mirrored area.
Handful of dedicated buttons let you control the second screen, you can bring up a virtual number pad, turn the screen on or off, adjust the brightness and move the current window from one screen to the other.
Unless you're constantly running video in the second screen doesn't significantly impact battery life.
But the laptop only lasted a little over two and a half hours in our battery tests.
So the 16 minute hit from the smaller screen seems pretty inconsequential.
