Unfortunately, those never made it far past the drawing board. ![]() Remember Project Ara and P honebloks? Those were concepts for truly modular phones in which you could swap out cameras, storage modules, batteries, and more. Of course, that's something else we'll get into in a bit. It seemed pretty unnecessary to us, but it looks like many of you in the comments actually liked the idea of it, as it rid the front screen of a notch. In fact, we saw ZTE try this design out with the Nubia Z18S just a few days ago with a secondary OLED screen. The YotaPhones immediately come to mind with their secondary e-ink displays, but none have ever made it stateside (the YotaPhone 2 almost did). We've also seen some candybar phones with a traditional screen on the front, and a second one out back. That's not to mention the bezel that inevitably gets in the way of a true "larger screen" experience. Second screens just add way too much cost and complexity for very little gain. The Kyocera Echo was the first to bring this wacky idea to fruition, and ZTE attempted to revive it last year with the Axon M. Regardless of how you spin it, there's a reason why dual-screen phones haven't been commercially successful. Here's a fact: Smartphones only need one screen. In other words, we don't think projector phones will be coming back in fashion any time soon. Most recently, a company called MOVI began selling a phone with a relatively incognito projector, but with a MediaTek processor, a $599 price tag, and zero marketing, it's not surprising that its eBay account has 0 feedback and there are only two Amazon reviews. Motorola released a 0 projector Moto Mod, the Insta-Share Projector, but those can't even be given away. The Galaxy Beam wasn't the only projector-equipped phone, but there aren't many more out there. Cost and availability were factors, but projectors also made phones bulky, made them hot, and drained their batteries quite easily. In reality, though, these projector phones never really caught on for a multitude of reasons. A phone with a four-inch screen capable of showing a picture up to 50" in size sounds pretty good, no? Enter the Galaxy Beam, which debuted at MWC 2012. ![]() It's a nice piece of history, but not much more. This wildly unsuccessful phone from Bezos and friends didn't use a 3D screen, instead using four front-facing cameras to track the user's face to create a 3D-looking UI, dubbed "Dynamic Perspective." I personally own one of these gems, having purchased it for the princely sum of $25 about a year and a half after it was released. There have been a couple of others over the years, the vast majority of which you've almost certainly never heard of, with the only prominent one being the Amazon Fire Phone. At the time, both phones were actually pretty well-liked, with the 3D effect acting as a fun novelty, but the concept was quickly left in the dust.
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