One folds to the left, one to the right, and one upwards; your laptop (there’s room for a 17.3-inch engine) is meant to sit in the middle of this arrangement, giving the fourth screen in a quad-display setup. The top screen can tilt back so it faces away from the user, offering the potential to use that screen for presentation purposes (while still giving you three forward-facing screens to work on yourself). The panels do not have audio capabilities.

Fully expanded, the object is a monster, spanning nearly 46 inches (almost 4 feet) from side to side and 18 inches vertically. With a weight of 6.4 pounds, it will also add to your travel load, although it is clearly not designed for use in situations where real mobility is required.

Size isn’t the only challenge on the portability front: The KYY X90G also draws a significant amount of power—up to 30 watts. If your computer’s USB port can output that amount of wattage, the X90G can run via a USB-C cable connection to one of the two ports on the backing board. Mine seemed to give enough juice at first, but when I started to change the brightness to something usable (and draw more juice), the screens started flickering and failing. Fortunately, the KYY includes an additional USB-C cable and power adapter that, once connected to an outlet, ensures that I have no further issues with power consumption. That, however, means you’ll likely need access to two AC outlets for a typical laptop setup to work properly—another strike against trying to fire it all up at a Starbucks.

Each screen includes its own hardware controls, which allow for individual configuration, a traditional three-button operation that launches a simple menu system where you can adjust brightness, color, and contrast, and fine-tune the screen. The default brightness of 30 (from 100) is very bad for usability, but otherwise, I found that the factory settings can be used. I tested the X90G with a Windows laptop, and it was simple to arrange three screens around my central display in the Display settings control panel to extend my desktop in all directions.

Resolution Restrictions

Photo: Chris Null

In today’s laptop world, 1080p resolution won’t get you far, and I found it to be the main limiting factor for the device, which prevented the use of three additional screens due to the limited amount of content I could fill each of them. In fact, a minimum of 1920 x 1200-pixel resolution is required to make this extra screen real estate practical for knowledge work, although it’s fine for more casual content.