Sprint had planned to make an industry first announcement today and it did with the announcement of Kyocera Echo Android phone. It had roped it David Blaine for a special act and then followed that with the announcement of the first dual touch screen Android phone, with optimized user experience
The device has two 3.5 inch touch screens with 480x800 display, which can be used as single display or unfolded and used as 960x800 extended surface. The screens are connected using the patented hinges from Kyocera. The different configurations of the phone resembles the Smartphone, dual screen laptop and even a touch screen surface.
The phone also has a 1GHz Snapdragon process running Android 2.2 OS, with some optimized applications like browser, email and messaging that makes use of the dual-screen interface. The device also allows you to run different application in each screen and the full feature set of the device is yet to be seen. The OS has been heavily customized to make the dual screen feature available, as this is phone is the first of its kind. For now the third party apps cannot make use of the dual-screen mode, instead just fill the entire display, but looks like the SDK will be released soon to allow other apps also to handle this.
Sprint has been big on 4G and WiMAX support, but it is surprising that this phone has only 3G support, unlike other flagship devices of Sprint that have come out recently. The other major thing to look out for will be the battery life on the device. When single screen devices last only for a day, having two fully functional screen is likely to drain the battery really fast. The manufacturer claim is that the battery will last for a day with heavy use on both screens. The device also has rear camera and no front facing camera for video calls.
Well they seem to have got the pricing in the usual range of $199 with contract and the device is likely to release this Spring. The device is good, but definitely not as good as the competition that is already announced and releasing shortly. Hope this does not go in the same direction as Palm Pre for Spring
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