Yota devices, a manufacturer from Russia has teamed up with Flipkart to launch their Yotaphone in India. The YotaPhone is a one of its kind always-on smartphone. It has 2 displays, the one on the front is a 4.3 inch colour display and an electronic paper display at the back. The YotaPhone will be sold exclusively on Flipkart and is priced at 23,499.
The color display is a full touch panel with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels with a pixel density of 342PPI. The rear screen has a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels and has a touch zones under the display for control gesture. The rear screen is always-on and works even after the battery is drained and is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass. The Dual Screen setup is unique about this phone, while we use the colour display frequently, the E-paper display will save battery life while conveying the same amount of information.
The YotaPhone has a Snapdragon 400, 1.7GHz Dual Core processor along with 2GB of RAM. It has a custom software which runs on top of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean is outdated and there is no news of an update coming soon from Yota. The custom software allows the phone to share information between the two displays.
The phone has 32GB of storage which is non expandable. Though 32GB is adequate storage, some buyers do prefer a MicroSD card slot. On the imaging front it has a 13 megapixel rear camera with LED flash capable of Full HD recording at 30FPS. The rear camera is oddly positioned at the bottom, it may take some time to adapt to it. On the front of the device is a 1 megapixel front facing camera for the occasional selfies.
The device supports 3G and 4G LTE and has a Micro SIM slot. On the connectivity front the device has Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 LE and the standard Micro USB connector. The phone has a non removable 1800 mAh battery, it’s not a lot by today’s standard but the E-paper display consumes battery very frugally. The Amazon Kindle which has an E-paper display lasts for days.
