Sprint's big surprise at its news conference Monday night was not an iPhone, as some had predicted, but a rather Nintendo DS-looking Android smartphone called the Kyocera Echo.
It's got a dual 3.5 inch LCD touchscreens. That's right. Two.
Fully opened they measure nearly five inches diagonally.
The phone runs the Android OS and has a 1 gigahertz processor and a five megapixel camera with flash.
The device will be at the uber-popular $200 price point with two-year contract.
The dual screens allow you to view a YouTube video, for instance, while seeing other videos available, or have Facebook on one screen and email on another. This takes multi-tasking to a new level.
Or you can close one screen behind the other and get a traditional thin phone experience. Games are already being developed for the game that will take the DS approach, taking advantage of both screens during game play.
One caveat: the phone will come with an extra battery in the box. Guess we might not get much life running two screens at once. We'll have to see when the phone debuts in the spring. This is definitely one we hope to review.
Innovation in the smartphone industry, true innovation, is rarer and rarer these days and Sprint has come up with something completely different.
Bravo.
