Laptop bed desks could be very useful furniture items for people who enjoy working or internet surfing in bed. Since the surfaces of beds are hardly suited to keep a laptop and work on them (because of their low positions as well as because of their extreme softness), a laptop bed desk becomes a kind of inevitable furniture for people who work in their beds.

These desks are usually made portable and collapsible so that they can save space when not in use. Their legs can be folded and laid completely flat when they are not being worked upon. Also, the basic structure of these desks is quite basic.

They may just have a flat surface and four legs that collapse. The four legs are shorter than traditional desks they are just high enough to raise the top above the lap of the user.

Though most laptop bed desks do not have any kinds of enhancements of fixtures on them, some of them might have at least a side drawer in which to put a CD or some small thing that a person might require while working on them. They sometimes have fixed pen stands too.

Many of these portable laptop desks, especially in modern times, are made with lamps fixed to them. These lamps are battery powered and they have stems that are almost completely flexible. This adds to the usability of the desk, because the user does not need to keep the room light on when working on them.

A few advanced designs have been introduced lately. A popular design in this context is the laptop desk where the top can be removed and adjusted to an incline so that it provides better readability to the user. These inclines are generally at fixed degrees, such as 30 degrees and 45 degrees, and a single laptop bed desk can have 3 to 4 adjustments.

Another innovation allows the laptop lap desks to be used not only in beds when a person is reclining but also when they are sitting on a sofa for example. Here, the desks have front legs that can be partly folded so as to accommodate the persons lap when they are in a sitting position.