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It may be hard to imagine, but the seeds of what eventually grew to be the Sony Tablet P were planted long before the iPad made tablets cool. The initial idea for a dual-screened clamshell device actually came to fruition shortly after the PDA boom of the late 90s and was first mocked up using a $4 wallet to illustrate the folding concept. Sony’s Takeshi Goto, head of VAIO and mobile products, spoke with Engadget Chinese about the development of the Tablet P from concept to final product, revealing the many alterations made to the design over the years. Designers debated among several screen sizes from 5-inches to 7-inches and evaluated Windows as an operating system on an x86 platform before settling on a two 5.5-inch displays and Android running on an ARM CPU. At one point a prototype more closely resembled the Nintendo DS than the tablet we know today. It’s a design unique from the majority of the tablet field and speaks to Sony’s commitment to innovative design. The full (translated) story and more images can be found at the link below.
[via Engadget Chinese]
As a former Echo owner, the split screen phone/tablet is a great idea. Kyocera just didn’t have a chance with its horrendous battery life. a duel screen 5in tablet that was also a phone would be freaking awesome. Put in the battery friendly TI SoC, use SAMOLED HD, a gig of ram, and you would have one wicked gadget.
I really liked the folding design of the Echo, but I would never buy the Echo or the Sony tablet. The echo lost me with the waaaaayyyy outdated (circa 2009) processor, and the Sony can’t use only one screen.
But the S3 snapdragons are backwards compatible (meaning nothing else has to be changed to add the new processor) with original snapdragons (ie the Echo’s processor) so hopefully there will at least be a dual-core (quad-core) successor for the Echo.