Yota Phone is a Dual-Sided Smartphone With E-ink

Yota Devices has announced the Yota Phone, an Android-powered smartphone with an LCD display situated on one side, while the other sports an e-ink electronic paper display (EPD).

Both of the handset's screen measures at 4.3 inches, with the LCD screen in particular boasting a resolution of 1280 x 720, which is around 340 ppi (pixels-per inch). The Yota Phone aims to "help consumers enjoy life's virtual side without missing the real one" by switching between the two screens.

"Technology is setting the tone of our lives rather than the other way around," Yota said. "We at Yota Devices aim to rebalance the relationship with our smartphone."

The LCD screen is predominately designed for playing games, watching movies and performing general Android tasks, while the EPD one leans more towards delivering e-books and news articles.


The black and white side automatically updates itself with social media updates, notifications, calendar entries and news stories, among others. E-ink displays, meanwhile, don't require much power, allowing that side of the Yota Phone being able to stay on without draining battery life.

Yota's upcoming smartphone sports a 1.5GHz dual-core Krait processor and runs on Google's Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system. The main camera boasts 12-megapixels, accompanied by an unspecified "HD" front-facing camera.

The Yota Phone contains a 2,100mAH battery and 32GB or 64GB of internal storage, joined by worldwide LTE support capable of connecting on the 3, 7 and 20 MIMO bands.

Yota Devices also integrated a power button that doubles as a SIM card slot, with the company promising a batch of apps that will take advantage of the dual-screens. More on the device, which launches sometime during the second half of 2013, will be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in February.

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  • razor512
    might be good if you have full control over the e-ink, eg a button to send what ever you are looking at on the LCD, to the e-ink

    Great if you are reading a long article and want to switch to e-ink, or if you want to text then do that on e-ink.
    Reply
  • vaughn2k
    Time to look for something new and fresh...
    Reply
  • Afrospinach
    I just know if I got this I would end up innocently reading a news article while accidentally subjects those around me to hardcore porn.
    Reply
  • saturnus
    This is super cool. I was talking with a friend of mine a couple of months ago and said that exact idea would be great for a mobile phone. Can't wait till they have working full colour e-ink displays. That alone would at least double a phones battery time as the display is still by far the most power consuming component.
    Reply
  • fightingslu
    I would like this on a tablet
    Reply
  • halcyon
    This is quite neat but my thinking is who is Yota, what's their build quality, durability, etc.? Samsung, you should have thought of this instead of that weird camera thing you just pulled out of thy heiny.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    I like the idea of an eink display.... but lets just have a single display. Make it color eink or a mirisol display and get rid of the power hungry lcd. It would not be for everyone, but I am sure there would be a market for it.
    Reply
  • halcyon
    ^That'd be no fun. The dual display is innovative. The LCD could be 1080p just to silence the doubters and cover both displays in Gorilla Glass 2 with aircraft grade alumiinum for the balance of the body and voila!
    Reply
  • Branden
    i've been waiting for years for an e-ink phone. call me crazy, but i use a phone for calls/texts and would like to see the screen in sunlight!
    Reply
  • amdwilliam1985
    This is a great idea.
    Wait... Yota, please patent it worldwide before certain fruit company claims it's their innovation, I'm not trolling or kidding...

    Now, at any given moment are both of the screen active? If only 1 of the screen is active, can you seamlessly switch between the screens? It'll be great if I can play games and watch movie on the color side, and for everything else I'll do it on the e-ink. Someone else mentioned about color e-ink, move on to it in the future and we can see a new trend for smart phones. True innovations ;)
    Reply