Brent Morgan and his team at Transcendent Designs were frustrated that smart phones had a lot of information with a very small viewing area, but larger tablets often had a lack of functionality and power. The team worked to design a larger screen that could mimic the phone and have developed Superscreen. The 10.1 inch display of Superscreen shows the phone screen while allowing for large scale viewing and control. Superscreen is running an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign.
When the user downloads an app to their iOS or Android phone and syncs the Superscreen through a proprietary wireless connection, the viewing device will immediately mirror the smart phone on a 4 times larger scale.
Superscreen has a 2560x1600 HD 2K display, with a 4 Gigabytes of Ram and a 2 GigaHertz quad core processor. The device is 241.8 x 172.6 x 8.0 millimeters in size and weighs 450 grams. The camera on the back is 5 Megapixels and the front is 2 Megapixels, with 88 decibel speakers that will play when the phone is muted. The 6,000 milliAmp hour battery is 3.7 Volts and estimated to run for twelve hours on a charge. The device has a USB-C 3.1 connector and the charging cord supplied with the device has a USB-A connector for the charging unit.
The most interesting part of Superscreen for me is the proprietary technology that allows the screen device to mirror the smartphone from a range of 100 feet. The campaign page says that the technology is a mesh of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth using IEEE 802.11 protocols. Once the patent is issued for this technology it will be fun to sift through it and see what new innovations are hiding in the data transmission. It’s shown in the video that the phone can control what the user sees on the tablet and that through the app the tablet also controls the phone display. In addition, the phone can be in hibernate mode and the user can be actively using the tablet to access the phone’s apps.
It’s easy to dismiss the Superscreen by saying that you don’t need a larger screen for your phone, but 60,000 people were on the pre-launch wait list so there are definitely a huge chunk of people who see the need for a $99 large screen. The campaign ends on April 19, 2017 and first orders are estimated to ship in December.