Introduction

Recently Taiwanese vendor GeChic got in touch with us about a new product set to appear on American shores, the On-Lap 1301 laptop monitor. The concept? A portable 13" screen that affixes to the back of your notebook lid and swings out, extending your desktop space and powered by a USB 2.0 cable. The first inclination is to expect another DisplayLink peripheral, but the On-Lap 1301 actually uses HDMI or VGA out from your notebook, and thus dodges all of the pitfalls of using a USB-driven screen. So how effective is the On-Lap 1301? We took it for a test drive to find out if GeChic's screen is the productivity enhancer you were looking for.

Installation

GeChic is presently an exceedingly small company with just one product to their name, and that’s the one we have on hand. The On-Lap 1301 is a 13” screen that can use either suction cups to affix to the back of your notebook lid and hinge outward, or stand up using included rubber green stands. The On-Lap is basically as fresh as it gets; the instruction manual’s English is understandable, though a bit tenuous at times and occasionally light on detail. Still, it’s easy enough to divine how to use the screen. You can opt to use the included rubber green stands, but you’ll find them problematic for a variety of reasons we’ll get into in a bit.

First, there’s connecting the On-Lap. The only cables included in the box are the VGA and HDMI dongles; the USB power cable is tucked into a small area beneath the screen. There’s a panel that slides off, and from there you extend the cable out of the side. To the left are the two internal connectors for the screen, but this is where the On-Lap runs into its first major problem: both cables are routed out of the bottom of the screen, essentially making the stands next to impossible to use as the screen itself will always be propped up on the display cable itself. That’s probably fine, though; the stands themselves are flimsy and don’t have any direct way to actually connect to the screen, making them impractical in real world use. They strike me as an afterthought; the On-Lap is clearly designed to be affixed to the back of your notebook lid.

On that front things look much better. Four suction cups get screwed into the back of the mount, and the suction cups themselves are actually extremely effective. GeChic includes mylar pads which you can affix to your notebook lid (and then affix the suction cups to the pads), but I found them inessential: the flat surface of my ThinkPad’s lid was perfectly fine and suction was more than adequate. This is really the ideal way to use the On-Lap, with the screen hinging out to the right. It looks more than a little awkward on my 11.6” ThinkPad, but just about any 13” ultrabook or portable should be just fine. As for weight, while the On-Lap is about two pounds, I found that most notebooks should still be able to handle the weight without tipping. Since you can adjust how far out the screen swings and the screen itself is the heavy part, it’s not difficult at all to balance the two together.

Performance and Screen Quality

The GeChic On-Lap 1301 is a 13” screen being powered off of USB, and as a result it’s not exactly going to be a big winner on any technical merits. On NewEgg, GeChic rates the 1301’s brightness at 200 nits and the contrast ratio at 500:1, and just like the big boys they cheerfully exaggerate the screen’s capabilities. Thankfully they’re honest about color quality; because it’s a TN panel it only produces 262,000 colors. Viewing angles are in the doghouse, too, but given the size and orientation the On-Lap is expected to be used in, that’s not a major strike against it.

What does strike against the On-Lap 1301 is the use of a glossy finish instead of a matte. Understanding that gloss is fairly typical of consumer-oriented products, the On-Lap suffers mightily for its finish due partly because its “closed” position still leaves the screen exposed. Glossy screens show dirt far more easily than their matte counterparts. Worse still, that means the screen is left essentially unprotected. Given that pressing the control buttons on the back of the screen results in ripples in the display, it stands to reason the screen is neither well-reinforced nor well-protected, making its value as a travel accessory suddenly much more questionable. While the frame feels durable enough, I’d be concerned about the safety of the screen itself, especially when it’s retailing for $200.

So how does it actually rate in terms of raw performance? The On-Lap 1301 sports a maximum brightness of 142 nits, but default brightness is just 94, both well shy of the rated 200 nits. With default black levels at 0.7 nits, that works out to a contrast ratio of 134:1, again well below what GeChic rates it at. Delta-E is no better at 2.53 on average, but color gamut at least is 42.7% of AdobeRGB 1998. Outside of the low brightness (a byproduct of being powered solely off USB), you could easily mistake the On-Lap for another laptop display. That’s good news for matching it up with notebooks on the market, but also speaks to the generally dire state of notebook displays. Still, we can’t complain too much since the On-Lap doesn’t actually require an external power source and can thus be used on the battery.

And how does it handle on the battery? The display is after all typically one of the most, if not the single most power hungry part of a notebook, so we tested it on the Acer TravelMate 8481T we reviewed recently using our internet battery test. The 8481T, without powering the GeChic display, is able to run for 8:41—that’s eight hours and 41 minutes, no mean feat. Plug in the display and running time drops to 5:55. That means if you use the GeChic On-Lap, you can expect your battery running time to drop by roughly a third assuming you’re using it with a similarly-sized notebook with a similar display. Honestly that doesn’t seem so bad given that you’re driving an entire second screen.

Conclusion

What we have with the GeChic On-Lap 1301 is a good idea unfortunately marred by some serious drawbacks. As a multi-monitor aficionado (my desktop sports three 24” 1920x1200 displays and I find them to be more practical than a single large display), I’ve frequently found myself wishing for a second screen when I’ve been on the go with my ThinkPad X100e. Be it screenwriting or article work, I always have at least a second document or window I want to have open and I like the order that comes with having Windows see two discrete displays. If you’re at all like me, the On-Lap is going to be a very compelling product.

Where GeChic fouls things up a bit actually isn’t with the mounting system, which is surprisingly firm (the suction cups are big and well-made, and I found even just two on the back of my ThinkPad was enough to support the On-Lap’s weight), but with how unprotected the screen itself is and the way cables are routed. The USB cable feels like it’s a bit too short, essentially forcing you to plug the screen in on the right side or rear of the notebook. That’s not a huge drawback but I can see it causing problems depending on what your laptop’s port placement is like. And while having that thin cable coming out of the side is helpful, running the monitor cables out of the bottom is not. The green rubber standing blocks are lousy, leaving the monitor tilted back at least 45 degrees no matter how you place them, and with the video cable coming out of the bottom it winds up not even mattering since the screen is going to be bumped up regardless. You can try to stand the screen vertically (resulting in a 768x1366 effective resolution), but even then it’s off-center due to the notch for the hinge being off-center. All this, and there isn’t included any kind of protective sleeve for the screen to travel in.

This is a potentially useful product that needs a revision. The screen needs to basically be facing the lid of the notebook and then slide out on a railed hinge similar to what Lenovo used on their dual-screen W-series notebooks. Display cables should also come out of the side instead of the bottom. I understand this design would prevent the On-Lap from being used as a display that faces outward for presentations, but the horrible viewing angles of the TN panel coupled with middling brightness honestly prevent that from being a realistic usage scenario anyhow. Finally, I’d like a built-in stand instead of the terrible green blocks so that users who don’t want to mount it can still use the display without too much hassle. The screen is so light even a basic swing hinge made of cheap plastic on the back should be more than adequate.

There are good ideas here. Honestly I don’t find fault with the mediocre display quality or low brightness simply because the On-Lap is portable and powered off of USB; you can forgive a lot when it’s this easy to add a second screen to your laptop. GeChic has a strong first try here, and there’s nothing else out there quite like it; the closest competitor is a 14” DisplayLink monitor from Toshiba, but that monitor can’t be mounted to your notebook, can’t use your notebook’s internal graphics (and thus doesn’t benefit from them), and will draw more power. At $199 MSRP the GeChic On-Lap 1301 is a reasonable investment if you have a need for a portable second screen, but I’d personally like to see a revision come down the pipe before going investing.