From smart to genius: will design define future gadgets?
the words of one reviewer on the technology website Engadget, like yet another plain smartphone - dark, nondescript, and maybe a little like an iPhone 4 that's had its right-most extent sliced off.
Flip open the two layers, however, and you had a phone with twice the normal screen size. Suddenly it's a little tablet, two screens forming a 6-inch slate, the Engadget reviewer wrote.
The prototype, which belonged to Imerj, part of Singapore-listed contract manufacturer Flextronics International , intrigued: The Engadget article attracted more than 400 comments. It wasn't a wholly new concept, but the design was impressive, including the software, which included apps that made the most of the extra screen. Imerj promised a kit for software developers, and a team worked on a slew of apps that made use of the innovative dual screen. They dreamed big: to take on Research in Motion's BlackBerry.
We had an idea that the smartphone was going to be the primary computing platform for most people going forward, recalled Brett Faulk, then Imerj's vice president of marketing. However, it has two challenges: small screen and small keyboard. So the concept was to create a product that scales as my productivity needs increase.
After a few months, however, everything went quiet. Imerj's Twitter account went dead, as did its website. Both are now offline. Faulk and others left the company. Flextronics declined to comment, as did frog's Pugh.
A former member of the Imerj team said the project was deliberately aimed at a niche far from Apple's
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