Kyocera Echo Announced By Sprint, Coming This Spring

As was expected (thanks rumor mill), Sprint announced their newest Android phone tonight in New York City – the Kyocera Echo. The phone has got a folding design with dual-touch displays, making up a combined 4.7-inch screen. The dual-screens are really the start of this device. Sprint is promising four ways that an app and the user can use the dual screens, and they’re kind of interesting.

As far as the specs, the Echo is running a 1GHz Snapdragon processor with Android 2.2 (No 4G!). Each screen by itself is about 3.5-inches (aka iPhone size), but when you’ve got the second screen popped out – it makes it a total of 4.7-inches, which Sprint is promoting as “the biggest phone display from Sprint yet.” Sort of a technicality, as it’s not just one big screen.
Sprint’s webpage is promoting these as the “four modes” of the Echo:

• Single-screen Mode: The phone is closed. You’re using just one 3.5-inch screen, like a regular Android phone.
• Tablet Mode: The phone is open, and you’re using both screens like one 4.7-inch tablet. Well, one with a hinge in the middle.
• Simul-Task Mode: You can run two apps at once. I guess this is like real multitasking (Sprint has trademarked the term “Simul-task”) but the functionality of this mode has already been questioned.
• Optimized Mode: This is what I’ll call “Nintendo DS” mode. Apps will use the two screens to their advantage. For example, in the press images released by Sprint, they show a YouTube app. The top screen is showing the video while the bottom screen is showing all the YouTube menus like “next videos” and “related videos”, etc. This could be the most promising from a user’s perspective.

What do you think about the phone? Initial reaction on Twitter and Android fansites by my count seems to be overwhelming negative. The hinge is awful design in the year 2011 (Remember the BlackBerry Style? Yeah, Sprint had that phone too.) Tablet mode, in my opinion (without having tried the device – we’ll ask Sprint for a review unit) is completely useless with the hinge cutting through the screen. How could you play games like Angry Birds like that?
Anyway, the phone is coming for $200 on a two-year contract. No exact release date except for “Spring 2011″. Sprint does have a mailing list up on their site, so you can pop in your e-mail if you’d like to be informed as soon as they start pre-orders for this phone

Posted in: mobile phone technology