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Yotaphone Dual-Screen Android Smartphone Unveiled Today

phone3At first glance the title of this post probably made you think George Lucas had sunk to a new low, but don’t worry. This is not the Star Wars phone you were looking for,

Remember that dual screen smartphone which E-ink teased us with at IFA Berlin? Today we found out who the hardware partner is.

Yota Device, the parent company of the Russian telecom, has just unveiled the world’s first dual screen, dual sided Android smartphone. They’re calling it the Yotaphone, and while we don’t know yet which networks are going to offer the phone, but I have been told that the first prototypes have only recently been forwarded to operators in Europe, Asia, and North America, in anticipation of deployments scheduled for the third quarter of this year.

phone2

The Yotaphone has a pair of 4.3″ screens. I don’t yet know the resolution of the E-ink screen, but the LCD screen has a relatively decent resolution of 1280×720. (I would describe that as high, but when compared to the latest smartphones it is about average.) This phone is running Android 4.2 on a Qualcomm 1.5GHz Snapdragon Krait dual-core CPU. It’s expected to ship with 32GB or 64GB of Flash storage, a 12MP camera, and LTE connectivity.

Yota has reportedly been working on the phone for the past couple years, and they’ve come up with a couple ways to make use of the E-ink screen as a second passive display (and as an ereader, too). For example, you can shunt content like a boarding pass or other info to the E-ink screen and then keep using the LCD screen to get more work done, play game, etc.

There’s no word yet on retail price, but Yota has said that they plan to show off the phone at CES next month and at MWC in Barcelona in March.

Update: Russian sources are reporting that the retail is be around 20,000 rubles, or about $653 USD. Thanks, igorsk!

Yota

 

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Comments


Mike Cane December 12, 2012 um 9:24 am

Hmmmm… so when does the countdown clock start for this joining the Kyodo Mirasol Reader in your pile?


steve December 12, 2012 um 10:19 am

Amazon owns a patent for a two sided, dual screen, e-ink and lcd device. Next generation screen technology should make this offering obsolescent in a year or two. I’m hoping for a sort of color e-ink device that carries a front lighting technology, like the Glowlight or the Paperwhite. That would be super power efficient.


igorsk December 12, 2012 um 11:24 am

According to the following article, retail price will be 20000 RUB (~650 USD) and planned release date is Q3 2013 in Russia, Q4 in other countries.

http://top.rbc.ru/society/12/12/2012/836220.shtml

It supposedly took 35 engineers and 25 million dollars to develop it.


E-ink Equipped Yotaphone to Ship in Europe in November, Will Cost 500 Euros – The Digital Reader November 11, 2013 um 1:46 pm

[…] been some 9 months since we got our first look at the Yotaphone, the first smartphone to sport an E-ink screen and an LCD screen, and finally I […]


Dual-Screened Yotaphone Delayed Indefinitely – The Digital Reader November 11, 2013 um 2:00 pm

[…] Devices has been teasing us with images and prototypes for the Yotaphone since December 2012, but it wasn’t until September 2013 that they officially announced a release […]


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