By Stephen Schenck

Amazon’s been in the news a lot today, and that trend’s just going to continue for a bit longer. A new patent application has turned up for an innovative tablet design, raising questions of if it will be featured in an upcoming Kindle Fire model.

Amazon’s design is a tablet with screens on each side. One will be a normal LCD, while the other will be an electronic ink display. Software will use information from device sensors to detect its current orientation and display data on the proper screen. For anything that requires a lot of motion, you’d use the LCD, while text or other still images could save a lot of battery life by being viewed on the e-ink screen.

We don’t know for certain if Amazon is planning to actually craft any product along these lines, nor if it would run Android, but that’s certainly a possibility.

While the idea is unusual, and we always like to see something new, we’re a bit concerned with just how practical it would be. Even if you’re not scratching the screens all up, we can imagine the less-frequently-used screen would quickly become smudge central.

What do you think? Is this just too outside-the-box to be practical, or could Amazon be on to something here?

Source: USPTO
Via: Mashable