You’ve probably seen the advert: a town wrapped in white paper, a “blank canvas” on which we can start afresh, create from scratch. The perfectly reasonable question, “why do we keep following the same old design rules?”. The answer (probably), “because your bendy green parking meter takes up twice the pavement space of existng, perfectly functional parking meters”.

Then after all that build up – what will Ford’s totally original, designed from a blank canvas, revolutionary car look like, oh the suspense! – they bring out the Kuga. And it looks like… a car. Oh.

It got me thinking, we all know what a laptop looks like, but is the current design the definitive one? With the arrival of the Eee we saw a whole new category of laptop, but the design was still pretty much as expected. Keyboard, mouse buttons, lid: check. There must be at least one other design that makes enough sense to make it to mass market.

We’ve seen some innovations. I recently blogged about what I thought was Sony’s new “sideboard PC“, which has actually been in existence for some years without catching on. Intended to sit on the side and play music while folded up, or open out to allow web browsing for those who just can’t slow down and sit at a real desk, its £700 price ensures limited appeal.

There are plenty of other examples. Take the Xentex prototype laptop that surfaced many years ago but never saw the light of day. With a dual-screen, folding chassis, it’s certainly different, but whether cutting the screen in two aids productivity is another matter.

This laptop in a desk must be seen to be believed, but closer to the norm was the 15in NEC Versa P700 notebook with a ground-breaking native resolution of 2,048 x 1,536. The fact that we’ve seen nothing of the sort since tells its own story there.

Slightly more successful – at least with reviewers – was the HP Jornada, a small flip-out handheld running Windows CE. Back in 2002 we called it “one of the best all-round keyboard-based handheld PCs on the market”, but unfortunately our enthusiasm wasn’t matched by that of Joe Public. A larger Jornada 820 looked more like a small laptop, still with CE installed, but the range soon joined the ranks of the could-have-beens.

My particular favourite is this, the IBM ThinkPad 701. Its two-piece “Butterfly” keyboard is a gadget so brilliant it apparently (if anyone can confirm this please do) made a very brief appearance in Q’s laboratory in a scene in GoldenEye. If it’s good enough for Bond I can’t see why we don’t all have one.

And finally, moving full circle, who can forget the doomed Palm Foleo, which was essentially one of these newfangled low-power mini-laptops before such a thing even existed. It was intended to accompany your smartphone to make emailing and document editing easier. That’s right, a mini laptop for only the most basic of tasks, to carry around in a bag as a sidekick to your small and pocketable phone. Our esteemed Editor may have liked it at the time, but it’s not hard to see why that one was canned before it even got off the ground.

These are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of laptop design. If you know of any particularly interesting/ridiculous doomed designs, let us know below.