LG’s announcement of the V10 was pretty exciting and the second screen seemed clever. Of course, phone historians know the second screen is something that has been tried many times in the past, it just never caught on.

Just note that we’re not talking about flip phones here, which obviously have a second screen on the inside. No, we’ll delve into the most unusual screens to grace a phone.

Samsung Continuum

Here’s one phone from late 2010 that had a second screen – a 1.8″ line display at the bottom to show additional info below the 3.4″ main screen. Like the LG V10, this one actually had just one screen, a 4″ Super AMOLED, it was just divided into three: 3.4″ main screen, Android keys, 1.8″ secondary screen.

Motorola Wilder

Here’s one that actually had a second display unit. The Motorola Wilder boasted a 2.8″ 240 x 320px LCD (it was an entry-level phone) and a 0.7″ 96 x 16px secondary display. It showed missed notifications, song info, signal and battery strength. It was not constantly on though, the 910mAh battery just wasn’t enough.

LG Doubleplay

LG isn’t new to this game either. In 2011 it showed the LG Doubleplay – a slider with a QWERTY keyboard that is split by a secondary 2″ 480 x 320px display.

This display showed various handy shortcuts (mostly for apps that will benefit from the hardware keyboard). Some apps also show additional controls, e.g. tabs or bookmarks in the browsers. It also aided in multitasking.

Samsung Galaxy Beam

The secondary screen doesn’t have to be on the phone. In 2010 Samsung experimented with installing a pico-projector on the Galaxy Beam. It put out 15 lumens of brightness for a screen up to 50″ big with 800 x 480px resolution.

It found some success, getting two successors, the last of which came out last year.

Kyocera Echo and Sony Tablet P

I said “no flip phones,” but those technically aren’t, not in the usual sense at least. In 2011 Kyocera showed off a dual-screen phone that combined two 3.5″ 480 x 800px screens into one 4.7″ display… with a pretty huge gap down its middle.

The following year fellow Japan company Sony tried something similar with the Tablet P. It put together two 5.5″ 1,024 x 480px screens with a marginally smaller dead space between them, but it wasn’t much better.

Samsung has patented an assembly based on a bendable screen that will use a single screen and eliminate the be mid bezel.

This is hardly a new concept though, in 2008 Polymer Vision announced a phone (never released) that had a 5″ display that folds closed. It only managed 16 grey levels, no colors.

YotaPhone

Another greyscale screen would prove more practical six years later. The YotaPhone put an e-Ink display – the stuff found on Kindle, B&N, Kobo and other e-book readers – on the back of the phone. This always-on screen would display notifications and other info while drawing basically no power. It had great sunlight legibility too.

YotaPhone has produced several versions, though the company is struggling a bit to enter western market.

Samsung Galaxy Note Edge

While Samsung is yet to produce a consumer-ready screen that can be folded in half, its bendy screens allowed it to create the Galaxy Note Edge. One screen was divided into two – 5.6″ QHD main display and a strip on the side that can be on for most of the day.

It would display notifications and other info while the screen is off and multitasking and other controls when the screen is on. Some clever app-specific uses involved putting a virtual shutter key that felt almost like it’s on the right side of the phone (not quite, it was at an angle).

LG AKA

We’ll finish off this with something unusual, but it could prove the most interesting of the all. It technically does not have a second screen, but its case leaves the top of the screen uncovered. The phone uses that to draw eyes – yes, eyes.

The AKA comes with several different personalities and in a Tamagotchi-like fashion it needs attention from its owner. Why is this interesting? Well, digital assistants are a dime a dozen these days, but even the best of them sound kind of robotic.

Yes, Siri can pull off a few rehearsed jokes, but the LG AKA is the first phone to bring emotions into the mix. People spend enough time talking to their phones as it is, AKA-like phones in the…

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Google unveiled its 2015 vision for the perfect Android phone – the compact, affordable Nexus 5X and the big, premium Nexus 6P. Ignoring the silly price premium that Europeans will have to pay, both phones caused a lot of excitement.

The Nexus 6P is the first Nexus phone with a metal unibody. It features a last-gen Samsung display – 5.7″ Super AMOLED, just like the Note5 – and an impressive camera with large pixels for surprisingly good image quality. We saw a 240fps slo-mo video from the camera and it looked great.

So, Huawei Nexus 6P – thumbs up or down? We feel this is an easy enough to answer, in the US the new flagship is a killer deal.

The Nexus 5X was LG’s chance to improve on the highly popular 2013 model. It features a slightly bigger screen, 5.2″ 1080p, but there are a great deal of compromises. For one, the chipset is not fast enough for 240fps videos, it comes with 2GB of RAM too (like the Nexus 4 back in 2012), it doesn’t have stereo speakers either.

For still images and videos the camera is still great, plus the Nexus 5X adds the fingerprint reader and USB Type-C goodies like the 6P. Still, this vote might end up…

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Another week flew by and the new Nexus duo seems to be on everybody’s mind. Both the Huawei- made Nexus 6P phablet and the LG Nexus 5X have flooded the news section, as the industry was eager to learn everything there is to know about the latest and greatest Google smartphones. Besides the obvious first look and specs run down at the unveiling event, we already have a clear idea of what the handsets will cost. The EU pricing seems to be particularly hard to swallow, but hopefully, it will be reconsidered shortly.

LG also excited users with another phone announcement – the peculiar LG V10. It has at least a couple of oddities going for it, like a small second screen above the main display and a dual front-facing camera setup.

Other noteworthy announcements from the past few days include the powerful Pixel C tablet and the flagship-grade HTC Butterfly 3. Another big topic this week seems to be camera performance. A few devices paid a visit to DxOMark with truly impressive results, like the Xperia Z5, which is now officially the king of the turf. The Nexus 6P and 5X also did well.

Last, but definitely not least, if you are still waiting on the next Lumia flagship device, you will be pleased to hear that it is getting ever closer to a release. The Lumia 950 XL keeps popping up in rumors and renders all over the place, so it shouldn’t be long now.

For this and more, check out this quick run-down of our most popular articles below.

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LG V10 goes official with secondary display and a duo of front-facing cameras
The Korean manufacturer’s latest flagship phablet will hit the shelves in Korea this month in five different color schemes.

Huawei Nexus 6P is all-metal, starts at $500
The phablet packs a 5.7″ AMOLED QHD screen, Snapdragon 810 chipset and runs Android 6.0 Lollipop.

LG Nexus 5X launches with a Snapdragon 808 and 1080p display
The phone will be available for pre-order from today starting at $379.99 for the 16GB model.

Google unveils Pixel C flagship Android tablet
The exciting new device comes with a detachable keyboard and a USB Type-C interface.

YU teases Yutopia, says it’s the most powerful in the world
We are yet to learn hardware specific, but Yu is already making huge promises for a flagship phone “without compromises”.

Sony Xperia Z5 has the best mobile camera ever tested by DxOMark
Just yesterday DxOMark added the Huawei Nexus 6P and its camera to its charts, and the new Google phone had some pretty impressive results. It climbed to the No.2 spot in the charts, behind only Samsu…

These HTC smartphones are confirmed to get Android 6.0 Marshmallow
HTC will begin rolling out the new firmware to its flagship smartphones before the end of this year.

HTC Butterfly 3 is now official with Snapdragon 810 and 20MP Duo camera
A rebadged version of the J Butterfly, launched in Japan in May, makes a global appearance.

Microsoft Lumia 950 XL measures revealed in leaked factory render
The Redmond giant’s next-generation flagship smartphone will debut in a little over a week, on October 6 in New York City.

Nexus 5X and 6P India pricing revealed
The 5X starts at around $485 and the 6P around $608.

Analyst predicts December launch time-frame for Xiaomi Mi 5
This comes just weeks after a leaked teaser image of the device surfaced online, revealing that it could possibly pack in a fingerprint…

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The numbers have spoken – the iPhone 6s Plus is catching up with its little bro in customer demand. The company that insisted no phone should be larger than 4 inches has managed to convince its user base that big screens are the way to go in a matter of two product generations.

You would have thought that the reception of an even heavier phablet won’t be all that warm, but voters don’t seem upset by the 192 grams of heft. Perhaps the proportional weight gain of the regular-sized iPhone 6s might be just enough to push some to finally make the move to the Plus.

After all, a 142g phone isn’t all that easy on your pocket anymore, and once you have that thought planted in the back of your head, it’s a matter of time before you start making other rationalizations to justify the larger diagonal. It would also seem that the optically stabilized camera and better battery endurance are worth the $100/€100 difference between the two models.

All that being said, the 4.7-inch iPhone 6s still manages to nose out the Plus by about a hundred votes. However with numbers split 51% to 49% it could go either way when detailed sales reports start coming…

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