And now, for something completely different. Well, maybe not completely — it is still a smartphone. But, the Axon M is certainly one of the most unusual phones we’ve ever seen. With two screens, how could it not be?

The phone has two 5.2″ 1080p displays — one on the front, one on the back. The back one is attached to a hinge and can be flipped out next to the main one like a book!

OK, you might be wondering why. Well, for most of us, there might not be a good answer to that question — at least not one good enough to warrant buying a new phone. Still, there are some pretty neat things you can do with the Axon M, and I was able to see a few for myself when I got an advance look at the Axon M not too long ago.

The most obvious one? Multitasking. The second screen can run one app while the main screen runs another, which opens up some interesting possibilities if you’re a phone-only person these days. You can watch a video while running a messenger app to chat with friends about it, or have a note-taking app open on one screen while reading a document on the other. It’s kind of like the multitasking mode we see on other Android phones, but now you get two whole screens worth of room to work with!

If you do a lot of reading on your phone, you might want to use the two screens together as one. This turns the Axon M into a small tablet, which I thought worked pretty well for browsing the web. It might not be to everyone’s liking, though — there’s a pretty noticeable seam between the two displays that can interrupt your reading flow.

I’m most skeptical of mirror mode, although the ZTE reps I talked to did show me a couple pretty cool uses for it. In this one, both displays show the same thing — useless if you’re by yourself, but if you need to kill some time with a friend, you can set the phone up like a tent and the two of you can watch the same video on a full smartphone screen or play a two-player game.

So, is all that worth buying a new phone for? Depends! If you really like experimenting with new gadgets, this is the freshest take we’ve seen on a smartphone in a while. And, for what it’s worth, it might not be the last of its kind, whether it sells well or not — there’s a lot of money being poured into developing a foldable display right now, and if that research pans out, we could see folding phones become the norm!

You’re really going to have love experimenting, though. The Axon M will be an AT&T exclusive and will cost $24.17 over 30 months on AT&T Next, which comes out to about $725. You can bet AT&T is going to push this as a great device for DirecTV when the Axon M makes it to their stores sometime in the weeks to come.

Next page: The techie stuff!