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Buying a smartphone from Apple is same purchase a car from Ford, in the days of the Model T. You crapper hit any kind you want, as daylong as it's black.

Thanks to Google's "organic," open-source Android operative system, another smartphone manufacturers are liberated to make more unequalled phones. But whatever smartphones are more unequalled than others ... especially these two!

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play

Here's a unearthly Android sound for you. It looks more or less connatural at first, but instead of a slide-out keyboard it's got a slide-out PlayStation-style gamepad, with touchpads instead of threefold similarity sticks.

Now, the construct itself isn't what's weird. Slider phones hit been with us for years, and it's not that bounteous a move from a slide-out keyboard to a slide-out mettlesome controller. No, what's unearthly is that Sony Ericsson is making this, when Sony already has a game-playing gadget that looks remarkably similar. What gives? Are they trying to revilement into their possess market?

Perhaps they've meet seen which artefact the wind is blowing. The iPhone has embellish the gaming papers of pick for casual gamers, and modify Nintendo is acknowledging Apple as its large threat. Sony has always targeted the "hardcore" gaming set, so adopting "PlayStation Certified" Android handsets haw be its best shot, at ownership its tech-savvy fans bespoken to the PlayStation brand.

The Kyocera Echo

Speaking of Nintendo, Japanese sound concern Kyocera seems to hit taken whatever cues from its dual-screen "DS" mettlesome housing to pass the Kyocera Echo. Except that both of the Echo's screens are touchscreens, instead of meet one same on the DS, and it's a person sound instead of a clamshell gadget.

According to the Echo's site, it "has features you haw not modify know you need ... yet." But most of those features are accepted Android smartphone fare, while its echoed concealment manoeuvre exclusive takes up a small conception of the features page. It says you crapper separate digit apps simultaneously on them, or ingest the lowermost concealment as a keyboard; ground this is better than a person sound with a keyboard, I'm not sure. But you crapper also ingest both screens together to check movies, which, I guess, is meet fine so daylong as you don't mind the black forbid interrupting crossways the middle.

The intellectual of the DS was that its lowermost concealment was a touchscreen, at a time when exclusive Palm Pilots had them (and indeed, DS systems still come with a stylus). This permit mettlesome programmers ingest that concealment as an player control, or ingest either concealment to pass at-a-glance information. Kyocera is trying to attractiveness to Android developers to indite custom, dual-screen apps for its phone, but unless the Echo takes soured same the DS did -- or same Sony is hoping that its PlayStation-branded phones will -- it seems implausible that they'll get some takers.

Weird is beautiful

Just same the Internet down the obstruction to entry for composition and creating media, so that indie filmmakers crapper make movies same the upcoming "Project London," Android's prefabricated it easier to make a beatific smartphone. It lets manufacturers essay discover things that they wouldn't hit been healthy to, if they'd had to design the operative system themselves.

So despite the absolute weirdness of whatever of these Android handsets, I'm personally pleased that they're possible. If null else, the concern would be a less engrossing locate without them.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android sound and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been composition most profession and electronics since 2008.

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