Auxiliary display for Laptops

I am sure most of us have seen flip-phones (am talking about mobile phones here) which have a small LCD display which is visible even when the phone is closed. This litte display is extremely useful as it gives us important information like time/date/battery and caller identification without having to open the cellphone every time.

Microsoft has been working on auxiliary display for a while now - it should up in news around Feb this year. Well the guys at Engadget got a chance to demo it for themselves.

You can find pics and details of what's possible here. In a nutshell, they were able to do basic stuff like check the calender, view e-mail and control the media player even when the laptop was off.

Reminds me to some extent of the Audio CD player in some old HP laptops - it also had a single line display which showed battery percentage - and used to work even with the laptop turned off.

Best part is - MS guys at hand said that APIs will be made available for developers to use the aux display :)