We check out the new Yotaphone, a dual-screen device that’s normal phone at the front and cheeky eReader from behind, at MWC 2014…
Russian tech maestro Yota Devices made us pull various impressed expressions last year with its utterly bizarre Yotaphone, a cool dual-screen device that looks like your typical mobile phone from the front, until you flip that bad boy around and reveal the eReader magnetic display on the back. At MWC 2014 we grabbed a demo of the second Yotaphone, a sleeker, updated model – but will it have us ditching our Kindles in droves, and could it be the solution to long mobile battery life?
Although this is the second Yotaphone to date, it’s not called the Yotaphone 2: it’s just plain old Yotaphone still, as if the first, fat model didn’t even exist. This new model is certainly sleeker, with a more rounded and snoticeably slimmer frame compared to last year’s effort.
At the front you get a 5-inch AMOLED screen that’s big, bright and beautiful, packing a Full HD 1080p resolution. However, while you might want to use that screen occasionally for watching movies or playing games, chances are you’ll simply need to check your messages or notifications, right? That’s where the E-Ink display comes in.
Although you can obviously read eBooks on that 4.7-inch full-touch display, the real benefit is providing a low-powered way of checking texts, responding to emails and even getting online. In the demo we had, the screen appeared to be quite responsive, and is certainly big and sharp enough to flip through collections of the latest headlines, or your inbox.
Above, you can see a wallpaper on the AMOLED screen (left) and then replicated on the surprisingly sharp E-Ink rear screen (right)
Of course, you might not want to snap your Kindle in half just yet: there’s still no update on whether the Yotaphone will support the Kindle app any time soon, and in fact there are only a handful of apps that utilise that screen. Thankfully it’s fully functional for getting online, checking mail, receiving notifications, and widgety bits such as weather updates.
KitKat Android runs perfectly smooth on the quad-core SnapDragon 800 processor, backed by 2GB RAM. There’s 32GB of storage, while the 8-megapixel and 2-megapixel snappers round off a pretty decent spec set. Of course, the Yotaphone probably won’t see British soil until near the end of 2014, by which point the already-superceded processor might be looking a little creaky. Perhaps we’ll be onto iteration 3 by the time the Yotaphone finally does emerge.
Check out even more smart new mobile tech over at our MWC 2014 hub page
Leave a Reply