If there's one thing Nintendo's DS taught us, it's that there's some nifty uses for dual-screen electronics. The potential lies far beyond just gaming, and Microsoft Research's Ken Kinckley sees this perhaps more than anyone. Hinckley unveiled a prototype project he's been working on called Codex, which is essentially two OQO Model 02's fused together. The end result is a multi-tablet configuration designed to be more than a glorified eBook reader.

"The Codex has two screens, it's designed to be used that way, and you won't find any half-apologetic demos that try to mash them back together into one big screen," Hinckley writes in his blog. "Instead, it's all about the intelligent partitioning of tasks and interface elements across the screens."

As is essential for any would-be tablet, be it a single or dual screen version, Hinckley's concoction switches between portrait and landscape mode depending on the device's orientation. The screens can also be arched backwards in what he calls a battleship posture, or pop one of the screens right out of its binding.

Underneath the hood, the OQO Model 02 runs either Vista or XP with a 1.6GHz CPU, comes with WiFi and bluetooth, and uses either a 120GB hard drive or 64GB SSD. In other words, there's plenty of potential here for a kick-ass gadget.

Whether or not this ever makes it out of prototype form remains to be seen, and as such no information on pricing or availability has been made. Though as Hinckley points out, "the crass answer is you can have one now if you are willing to spend some dollars, build yourself a custom binder, and write a little bit of code."

Image Credit: Microsoft Research