"...the boffins at Samsung could come up with way of mounting it alongside a normal monitor"

That's the easy bit. Nobody uses anything but flat-panels these days, right? And what's the one thing every single flat panel's got on the back? Yup, the good ol' VESA mount.

So you just supply that 'ickle screen on the end of a flexible, adjustable arm, the other end of which bears a plate that sits between the VESA mount on the monitor & the VESA bracket on the stand. Job's a good 'un.

<fx: sits back and waits for royalties to roll in>

A nice idea, but as stated, it needs a couple of things:

better resolution support (perhaps 1080p) and better performance would be nice - perhaps they need to offer two models - this, and a slightly more expensive version.

If the small screen were a touch screen, that would be nice, as effectively you'd have a secondary interface for a secondary screen - you could drop nice widgets etc on there, to be run by touch rather than dragging the mouse to a second, tiny screen.

Would be a good screenshot of how you might use such a tiny screen...

When I work from home I share my one screen between my own PC and the work laptop using a KVM. I generally have music playing (through the hi-fi) from my own PC while I'm working on the laptop via the monitor. In this situation I'd like a small display to let me see what is playing on my own PC, it would be even better if it had a touch-screen to let me pause the music for a call without having to switch the KVM. To be honest it doesn't even have to be a proper display, a couple of lines of dot matrix display with some media control buttons would be fine.

Does anyone know of such a device?

There are several very good 24 inch monitors out there with street prices around the £260 mark (and that's good ones with sub 5ms times - there are budget options available down to less than £175). That will give you a 1920 x 1200 display which is 540,000 pixels more than this 22 inch and more total surface area.

"Being based on DisplayPort technology, as you would expect the secondary screen is not designed for performance but for functionality"

Shouldn't that be rephrased as "being based on USB technology"? Conventional DisplayPort signaling is as capable as DVI or HDMI.

I've been doing that for over a year! Have an 8" TouchScreen above my triple 17" rig at work - all powered by a lowly 6600GT PCI-E and mx440 PCI graphics cards:

http://sampler.homeip.net/shared_images/office_03.06.08.jpg

The mini-screen is great for us IT staff as you can have the current support ticket que showing so you've always got an eye on what's going on.

The screen itself I use is designed to go in a car but is perfectly adequate where it is, has a remote and was picked up off ebay for under £80 - so couple with a decent main screen it's still cheaper than going the Samsung route, is a larger screen and has a touch screen.

For that price, I could buy two decent, full size screens, and have ultimate flexibility. This sounds pretty crap to me.

At the price it would be cheaper just to get a bigger screen and just dedicate a couple of hundred horizontal pixels to widgets....

They are talking about DispayLink technology, not Display Port technology. DisplayLink is about having a software driver for putting graphics over USB onto the little screen, rather than requiring you to install an additional graphics card - or already have an output free on your existing card(s).

Looks like a rear-view mirror, might be good for automotive games...

Where are these standalone mini-monitors then? Would be useful for gaming with an IM client.

I'm not convinced this monitor is going to be as useful as Samsung thinks, so you put a chat conversation on to the 7inch monitor? Well, that's one or two chat conversations then..or possibly the email inbox?

It's not enough. I personally, and I don't think I'm anything unsual ( depends on your point of view I hasten to add!), but I have multiple chat windows open with 2 email clients

I think I'd need a couple of 10 inch monitors down the side, in which case, might as well simply go for a bigger screen or two 20+ inches.

I can think of one interesting use for it, in telcos, investment banking in OSS applications which raise alerts regarding the operational status of systems, which could pop-up on the 7inch.

Why no 22" black plastic mask with a 7" hole?

Considered the Logitech G15 keyboard ??

Little lcd display... media controls... works with most media players...

And a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a touchscreen monitor or a dedicated matrix display.

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/keyboards/keyboard/devices/3498&cl=gb,en

I know you can get it cheaper than that too ;)

Thanks for the suggestion but when I'm working on the work laptop the keyboard is also connected to the work laptop via the KVM. I want something that can stay connected to my personal computer.

I find using a network RDP connection onto the laptop gives a far superior display than using KVM (which I have as well), due to the rubbish monitor out quality from the laptop. If you've got a decent sized LCD monitor there's plenty of room - and you get cut and paste etc.

Any way to add more screens to a desk makes life that much better.