Potential new Pyra competitor ;)

[levi]

You can see that the keyboard extends both left and right under the d-pad and game buttons. It could be made out of two backlit LCDs I guess, but in practice you'd see a border where the plain plastic ends and the backlit LCD starts.

One way it could be done was to paint the top plastic layer with a translucent white layer that disappears once a backlight it lit behind it. On top of that layer put an old-school liquid crystal display and polariser, which can display the black keyboard. The coloured keys could be done with filtered lamps behind the white layer, since they're adjacent to the extended LCD. I just can't see an easy way to do the blue borders of the keys. The backlit LCDs backlight would also need to be split, which would also be difficult to do without light bleeding into the keyboard area.

 

[erico]

Just checked the other pictures, now I understand the screen better.

I was thinking about how to game with such stuff, we can guess its size a bit but can´t be sure.
The point is that while doing android dev, I feel that if the phone is small, the controls sit more comfortable on the lower part of the screen, like playing a nintendo watch game for example.
If the handheld/phone starts to get bigger in size, the controls feel more comfortable at the top, like the caanoo and note II or maybe the pandora.
I kind of think there is a relationship between your point fingers holding the top of the handheld and the distance they have to each controlling thumb, it shouldn´t be a too long distance.

So back on these proto, if they are small, it seems fine, but if they are anywhere a bit bigger then a pandora or a note II, then I´m not sure the controls on the lower part is a good thing.
Of course this is all speculation, but I like the design...hints a bit of retro.