What announcement did Sprint have up its sleeve?
February 16, 2011 Post a Comment Thursday, February 17th, 2011, Netcast 1289
After weeks of emails teasing the press by asking what does Sprint have up its sleeve, they hired street magician David Blane to unveil the mystery: the Sprint Kyocera Echo. This is the first dual touch-screen smartphone. There’s a unique hinge system that offers many options for the two 3.5” WVGA touch screens. You can place them side-by-side to form a single 4.7-inch display – assuming you can ignore the black bar between the screens. (A spokesperson said it’s easy to ignore the black bar when you start using the phone over a period of time.) The Echo ships with Android 2.2 (yes 2.2, not the latest) and additional software designed to take advantage of the two display screens. In the presentation, they demonstrated four screen modes. Standard mode uses one screen with the device folded to act like a normal touch screen smart phone. In tablet mode, the entire lower screen is a virtual keyboard, brightly back lit. The upper screen is the document, email, etc. you’re typing on. I liked this a lot! Beats slide out keyboards by a mile. Optimized mode gives you two different views of the same app. For example you can have your thumb nail photos on the lower screen and enlarge them one at a time on the upper screen. Simultask mode (newly minted by Sprint) is where can use two different apps at the same time, each displayed on its own touch screen. (Not all apps will support simultasking.) Of course all these features bring up the question of battery life. Sprint already took that into consideration. The Echo ships with a 1,370mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 5 hours. But wait, there’s more. Included in the price -- $199.99 w/ a two contract – is a second battery along with a special charging device. It lets you charge the battery in the Echo and the extra battery at the same time. And you can easily swap one out for the other. Both screens & apps share the 1GHz Snapdragon processor. Other features include a 5-megapixel camera that can record 720p HD video, mobile hot-spot capabilities for up to five devices. There’s 1GB of internal memory and a 8GB microSD card, included. It supports cards up to 32GB. And it operates at 3G data speeds, which could be a disappointment to some. There’s full HTML Web browser supporting Flash 10.1, which Sprint says has been optimized for dual screens. Supports Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. Coming early spring. All in all, I like this phone. It’s a lot of features for a decent price. $199.99 w/ a two-year contract. You can preorder now:
See or hear this Netcast: www.twit.tv/dgw1289
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