LG DoublePlay doubles up with two touchscreens

[Larry-G]

One touchscreen isn't cool -- you know what's cool? Two touchscreens. Meet the LG DoublePlay, an Android slider smart phone that boasts two screens, which show you two apps at the same time.

The DoublePlay, unveiled by T-Mobile in the US, looks inspired by the Nintendo DS -- and why not? It has sold more than 50m in the US alone.

The main display is a familiar 3.5-inch touchscreen. The second touchscreen is concealed beneath it in the middle of a slide-out Qwerty keyboard. The 2-inch second screen can show the same information as the main display, show different bits of the same app, or -- as we understand it -- two completely different apps at the same time.

Now that's pretty clever if it's true, but we suspect it may not work with most apps.

The phone also boasts a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and 720p high-definition video recording. Inside there's a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and it runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread software, with LG Cloud Text and Group Text.

We'll see more of the DoublePlay at the US National Texting Championship on 26 October, but it doesn't look like we'll be seeing much of it over here: it's a 4G phone -- still at the trial stage here -- so it would come to the UK in a different form, if at all.

Would you like your phone to pack not one but two screens? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below

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