Prototype dual-screened 2-in-1 Android smartpad from Imerj preview
From the front it looks like yet another plain smartphone — dark, nondescript, and maybe a little like an iPhone 4 that's had its right-most extent sliced off. Pick it up, though, and you realize this little thing isn't so nondescript.
Context & Ripple Effects
Imerj's prototype lands in the middle of a stretch of 2-in-1 experimentation on the Android side: Notion Ink's Tegra smartpad with a Pixel Qi display tried rethinking the screen itself back in December 2009, and Engadget's November 2010 Dell Inspiron Duo review tested the flip-screen convertible take on the category.
What distinguishes the Imerj device is concealment — a front face that reads as an iPhone-4-like slab, with the second panel hidden until the unit is handled. That puts it closer to the phone market than to the netbook convertibles, and makes the hinge and the software story, not the display tech, the differentiators to watch.
First-order effects
- Imerj enters the 2011 prototype circuit with a dual-screen 2-in-1 whose pitch is a familiar smartphone face hiding extra screen area, directly challenging single-slab Android designs.
- Buyers and reviewers now have a third distinct dual-display template to evaluate alongside Dell's Inspiron Duo convertible and Notion Ink's transflective-display smartpad.
Second-order effects
- Component makers in hinges and compact displays gain another prospective design win as vendors chase fold-out screen area instead of larger slabs.
- Rivals shipping conventional Android slabs face pressure to answer the 'more screen without more pocket size' pitch that devices like this make.
Third-order effects
- If prototypes like Imerj's keep appearing, competition on Android hardware shifts from spec sheets toward industrial design and whoever adapts the OS to multi-panel interfaces — an open question at this stage, since no shipped product in the corpus has proved the format.
The trend: Mobile hardware vendors are probing dual-screen form factors as a differentiation route once slab designs converge, with each prototype testing whether software can justify the extra panel.