YotaPhone, the dual-screen mobile device that made a splash at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, will launch in Russia, Austria, France, Spain and Germany before Christmas and in 15 other countries including the UK by the end of Q1 2014. In the UK it will only be available from Yotaphone's own online shop.
The YotaPhone has a 4.3-inch 720x1280 HD LCD on the front and a 360x640 e-ink display on the back. The colour LCD display can be used like a normal Android phone, while the rear e-paper display can receive notifications and display news or maps while conserving battery life. The YotaPhone is made by Russian smartphone manufacturer Yota, which also provides 4G mobile broadband services in the country. At a launch event in Moscow, Yota Devices CEO Vlad Martynov said that Yotaphone helps to solve the problem of the ‘always dark’ screen that current smartphones suffer from when in sleep mode.
Electronic paper display (EPD) technology can make information available and visible without draining the battery, meaning that the YotaPhone's e-ink display can be always on. “Once we determined that an electronic paper display would work as a second screen, an array of new and improved user experiences became obvious,” said Martynov. The rear-facing 4.3-inch screen is not simply a dedicated e-reader, though. Carrying a phone around in your pocket containing all your personal information leads you to wake it up quite a lot — sometimes just to check the weather or time. You don’t really need a backlit LCD screen refreshing 60 times per second to check email notifications, right? This works out to be a big drain on battery life over the course of the day, as Android’s stock battery usage monitor will tell you.
The YotaPhone puts relevant content on the back e-ink panel so you don’t have to fire up that power-hungry LCD as much. Yota will include custom software designed to work with the rear panel that can show you Twitter notifications, email, SMS, RSS feeds, or even Google Now. The company is also working on an API for developers to create new e-ink apps for the YotaPhone. One thing that will be a sticking point is the lack of an official e-book service in most countries. The device is on sale in Russia first, but will then expand to other regions. Yota is partnering with Bookmate in Russia, but there’s nothing in the works with Amazon for Kindle support.
The YotaPhone was first shown off at CES almost a year ago, and the specs listed at the time were definitely high-end. However, in the intervening year Android devices have continued their rapid advance in the hardware department, leaving the YotaPhone looking a bit dated. This phone packs a dual-core Snapdragon S4 Pro (first-gen Krait cores clocked at 1.7GHz), 2GB of RAM, a 4.3-inch 720p LCD, and an 1800 mAh battery. The e-ink screen is the same size, but only 360×640 resolution.
The YotaPhone is priced like a premium handset too — it’s going for 500 euros, or almost $700. For that price, other Android devices are shipping with quad-core ARM chips based on faster processing cores and 1080p screens. Even factoring in the reported 15% increased cost for the e-ink screen technology, this is still a pricey device for the specs. The battery might seem a little small too, but that’s kind of the idea. You should not need as much juice with the YotaPhone. Yota plans to sell the device in Europe and the Middle East after the Russian debut, but anything beyond that is unclear. The YotaPhone as it currently exists doesn’t support the necessary cellular bands to work in the US on anything but 2G GSM. Maybe it’s a gimmick, and maybe it’s a revolution — most of us will have to watch from afar to find out.
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