Back in 2009, LG launched a high profile feature phone, the BL40 Chocolate Touch, an obscenely long handset with what LG touted as a unique “dual-screen” UI. While LG’s long lost the lead in mobile, this feature: a two column view making full use of a large screen, has popped up in the unlikeliest of successors, the Samsung Galaxy S3.
The Pop-up Play feature included on the new Android flagship launched last night gives you the ability to push a video into a floating window and continue to use other apps around it on the phone’s giant 4.8-inch screen. It’s awesome. As we said last night, it’s the reason for quad-core phones.
But it also points to something else: phones are getting so powerful, and users so demanding, that sooner or later this split-screen functionality is sure to become standard, just as it has on the desktop. The question is, who’s going to jump first, Google, Apple, or Microsoft?
