Google Teases Dual-Screen Nexus Smartphone in Google Maps April Fool’s Day Joke (video)

31.03.2014 Nate Hoffelder 3 Comments

Google has made a name for itself in crafting elaborate April Fool’s Day Jokes, and they have outdone themselves this time. The Google maps team has already posted a joke video, and buried in the video is either Google’s next smartphone or a second meta-joke.

The video, which is ostensibly a job ad for the new Google Maps position of Pokemon Master shows what looks like a dual-screen smartphone that resembles the Nexus 5 (but is more likely a prop made up of two nexus 5 smartphones.).  You can see the front and the back of the device at about the 1:28 mark:

So is this a prop or a planned device?

Common sense tells me it is probably a prop which was used just to mess with us, but the gadget geek in me (an 8-year-old who jumps up and down and goes "Oh! Oh! Oh! Want! Want! Want!") is hoping that this smartphone is real.

This type of dual-screen smartphone isn’t a new idea. In addition to the much larger and quite different Entourage Edge tablets, several dual-screen Android devices like the Nexus prop shown in the video have been released over the past few years. Sony released the dual screen tablet P, and there have been a couple smartphones including like the Kyocera Echo, which was released in 2011, and the Medias W N-05E from NTT DoCoMo. So it is entirely that Google could make a dual-screen nexus smartphone.

But that doesn’t mean that this prop is real, just that Google added an extra dimension to the joke.

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