Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com the Kyocera echo is the first dual screen smartphone and it does some really cool stuff if you're wondering exactly how the two screens work in tandem with one another in this video we're gonna talk all about that so let's get to it so this is probably gonna be a long video because there's a lot to explain here so stick with us and you'll understand exactly how Q Sierra engineered this phone to work with two displays because it's pretty fascinating okay so the first thing that we're gonna do right out of the gate here is run quadrant to give you an idea of how fast the device actually is now we are running in the single screen mode right now we're gonna jump into the got a force close here we're gonna jump into the dual screen mode in just a minute but first we're going to run quadrant I'll be back when this is done okay and we're done here so let's click yes and see our result so not too good actually we're falling at around 754 in quadrant which is below the galaxy s the Kyocera echo could definitely benefit from more horsepower as you're going to see throughout this video it tends to be a little bit slow overall it's snappy but it could definitely use perhaps a dual-core processor or more RAM so let's go back to the home screen and flip out the second display so when first of all let's turn off the screen and see what happens when you flip out the second display when it's in standby the screen turns on and goes out of the unlock screen which is great saving you time so you don't have to unlock the display at all times so right now we are in tablet mode and we can actually flip this into landscape which you might look a lot better so the way to think about this is that there are three different ways that an app can run on both displays number one in tablet mode and in order to get that to work we're going to give plenty of of examples of exactly what that means you need to get the tablet mode extension from the Android Market which I've already gone ahead and done so the tablet mode will work in for example Twitter so Twitter will scale to the 960 by 800 resolution pretty good actually it looks just like it would look on a gal see tap the text is rendered at the operating system level so that looks crisp and clear some graphics might look a little bit blurry especially splash screens but generally it's usable and it's really cool to be able to have Twitter run on so many pixels yeah the black border is annoying but you get used to it another thing that's annoying is if you go into portrait let's see if I can show you an example see the word someone right there the som is lower than the e o n e on the right screen and hopefully the camera can actually focus on that so you can see that so the screens aren't perfectly lined up and I'm not sure if that's an issue with this particular model or if all Kyocera echoes are having that issue but it's it's kind of annoying that they don't line up which is why you'll probably want to keep it in landscape mode now there are a lot of other apps that do work very well in this tablet mode here's another example Facebook will work quite well it will scale to both screens perfectly let's go back another app that'll work of course is Angry Birds so we're going to Angry Birds and you're gonna see that it will let let you take advantage of all of the pixels there's the splash screen it's not the clearest because it's not made for so many pixels but let's let it load okay here we are at play so Angry Birds across two displays this is pretty cool isn't it so we can use the multi-touch here it can lift back it jumps to the other side pass us the black bar and it works it's Angry Birds and it works quite well and a lot of other apps work too so let's go to the Weather Channel that's another app that will scale very well across both displays giving you 960 by 800 pixels worth of screen information so as you can see apps are kind of slow to load in the most part especially in tablet mode but here we go The Weather Channel in full screen glory really taking advantage of all of the pixels on the screen if we go to the ten-day forecast you can pretty much see the entire 10-day forecast without having to scroll very much so really cool use of the pixels so there are plenty of apps that work just fine in tablet mode but then the second type of app that I want to talk about doesn't work in New York Times is a good example so where I load that up and sometimes that is slow to load you can see all the fingerprints that are accumulating on the screen and here's what the New York Times looks like in tablet mode it just doesn't work it kind of hovers in the center of the screen you can use it just fine but it's not taking advantage of all the screen space let's go back another app that doesn't work in the tablet mode is speedtest.net so I want to load that up and you're gonna see that it kind of hovers in the center a little bit better than New York time this but still you get these thick black bars on the side you're not really taking advantage of all of these pixels so those are the first two kinds of applications how they behave on this device number one ones that work just fine in tablet mode like Twitter and many many others and the applications that don't work in tablet mode like New York Times now there is a third entirely different set of applications called simulcast applications these are the ones that can do some really cool stuff with two displays the way you know a simulcast application is that for example the browser has those two dots in the bottom right corner contacts has the two dots email has the two dots that lets you know that it's a simultaneous era has made an S SDK available to developers if they want to make their application simulcast ready our guess is that you're not going to see that many simultaneous because the echo is one device it's kind of experimental and developers are probably not going to spend many hours making their app simulcast capable if they don't know that there are going to be a lot of echoes sold out there so let's talk about how this works email is a really good example of the simulcast capability so what we have here is the inbox list on the bottom and on the top you get an email preview and it's it works kind of like a tablet like an iPad or whatnot you tap on a message in the Inbox it will show up on the top it works even cooler if you go into portrait you get the inbox list on the left and the preview on the right now let's say you want to view the email on both screens there's a button right here that says full it will stretch it down so now you're using all the pixels to display just the email or if you want to go back into the previous view you just click on full so it works really well and by the way another cool feature let's reply to this email when you reply and you're in the to screen mode and you're doing something that requires text you get this awesome huge fullscreen keyboard and it's really comfortable your fingers rest nicely on the back of the hinge you don't want to use it in portrait the keyboard gets really small and you can say you know this kind of using it from a weird angle this is a test this is a swipe keyboard of course so you can draw letters with your finger hello did I get that yes and you get the point so again in portrait it kind of gets weird so now we have the text entry up here and the little sweat keyboard on the bottom you definitely want to keep it in landscape mode and even better you can flip out the screen and lift it up and you get sort of this HTC Touch pro2 like typing experience really cool let's go back to the home screen and talk about another simulcast application probably the best example is the browser so if we open up the browser right now we've got pocket now stretching across both screens that's pretty cool but even cooler is if we press this button down here now we've got two web pages on two screens and you can use them independently you can't use them at the same time you have to use one after the other but you're not going to use two websites at the same time if you go into portrait you get the same really cool effect to websites two screens at the same time really awesome and so let's go to any edge it on the bottom screen here so let's see there we go and now it's gonna look Engadget on the bottom screen here it is now unfortunately in the simulcast applications you can't use multi-touch you can't use pinch to zoom you can only double tap to zoom in this is because the and in this case you don't need to zoom in this is because the simulcast menu is brought up with two taps of the finger we're going to talk more about what exactly that does in a sec but here we are on an end gadget post we can't double tap or we can't you know pinch to zoom for example and we're gonna see that that's the case in other applications as well even if we go to the desktop view because you might be thinking well maybe the double the pinch to zoom doesn't work because you're in the mobile view but here we are in the desk view it doesn't work but double tap to zoom in does okay so you saw that screen before two fingers on the screen will bring up the Simon test menu if you get it right and from here what you can do is you can reverse the apps so now pocket now is going to come on the bottom and yeah it's going to come on the top another thing you can do is just change the app on the screen so we can say let's have gallery on the bottom and the web on the top so now we've gallery on the bottom and web at the top pretty cool right and what we're actually going to do is stretch gallery to both screens because gallery does some really cool things with the simulcast capability so there's a button here that should allow us to scale gallery to both screens here we go so now we get the gallery on the bottom and the image on the top and I've only got one image here and again pinch-to-zoom doesn't work you have to double tap to zoom in so imagine having a library of pictures here on the bottom and being able to quickly kind of tap on them to see the images appear on the top really cool feature let's do the Simon to the phone application by the way before I continue these are all of the site melt as apps that are available there are only seven of them so we're going to the phone app and the phone app will work with two apps at one time so imagine looking through your photo gallery while dala dialing your friend and unfortunately in the dialer we don't have quick dials so if you want to dial Bob and quick dial you do two six two because of the B and the O and the B no such luck in the dialer let's go back to the home screen and open up another simultaneity player made by Kyocera and you can watch a video on the top screen while looking for new ones on the bottom and one of the coolest parts about this is that you can take any of these videos tap and hold and if you get it right and drag it into your cue isn't that awesome so you can now while you're watching a video fill up your key with other videos to play and again this hinge so you can kind of have a better viewing angle if you're looking at it on a tabletop and we can simultaniously up to you but the fact that you can do that is is awesome so there are a couple more apps that we have to talk about okay so let's jump into contacts that's another sign motek capable app we do the double tap we can have let's say the browser on the bottom and then the you know the the contacts at the top and I think we're pretty much dining with the cyma task apps and if you're on the home screen you do a double tap by the way nothing's going to happen let's jump back into the browser see if we missed any we also have messaging which basically basically looks the same as you would expect in email so we can stretch it across both screens and we don't even have any text messages but it would work the same again there's a message index and then if you tap on a message it will show you the preview in another screen let's do the simultaneous apps these are the only ones that will work with this special functionality that will allow you to run one and then the other at the same time hopefully there will be more again Kyocera has released an sdk to make it possible for developers to take advantage of this functionality but our guess is that the silo test apps you just saw are the only ones that are going to be available for the echo for a while so wrapping things up just like you we were wondering whether having two screens on a smartphone actually makes sense and if it has any merit we can tell you that it does make sense and it does have merit did the idea of being able to look at two web pages side-by-side or to look at a web page while checking your email or watching a video while checking your email it is awesome Kyocera 'z execution of it definitely could have been better but we certainly can be forgiving since this is a first generation product we would love to have seen this with a ester processor in fact just a second ago it froze on me performance gets really bad when you start running to graphic intensive websites side by side the design could have been a lot better this is a very ugly device it looks very first-generation almost prototype ish not to mention that it's thick and it's heavy so the concept is awesome a dual screen Android phone we just have to say that Kyocera is execution of the concept probably wasn't the best and we're really hoping that other companies Samsung Motorola HTC follow suit with this concept of a dual screen phone but it's very likely the Kyocera has a lot of patents on this thing making it difficult for another company to enter the market and do something likewise coming up in the full review will have full benchmark tests remarks on battery life because you're probably curious about that plus other remarks on how this fares as a daily driver if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and thank you for watching that's it for now you