If your smartphone and your e-reader had a baby, it might look a lot like the YotaPhone 2. Combining the features of an Android smartphone with an electronic paper display on the typically forgotten backside, it's the world's first dual-screen smartphone. The rear e-ink screen is covered by a touch-sensitive, curved matte finish, and allows you to read, text, email, or tweet without even flipping over to the LCD screen. The rear screen stays on all the time, but uses way less energy and can hold a charge for up to five days. Practical use paired with imaginative design make it easy to see why some are calling this the smartphone of the future.
Yota's Got BackWithout the e-ink screen, the Y'phone works almost like any other Android phone, so let's stay focused on that. The most basic thing you can do with the screen is "throw" any image from the front screen to the back. If you have an airline boarding pass, say, you can throw that over to the back screen and keep it there while you do other things on the front. If you're headed to a meeting, throw a map. Or, as Geckler said, if you love Louis Vuitton, take a photo of the logo from your bag and throw it over to the back screen. (I'd probably stick with a photo of my daughter.)
Read texts on your backside with a dual screen on the Yotaphone
When we talk about dual-screen phones, though, we will be talking about phones that allow you to use both screens simultaneously. We have come to realize that such phones are so much better at dealing with hardcore productivity needs and are so much better when it comes to multitasking than bigger displays or bigger foldable displays.
Motorola has always tried its hand in different segments including the foldable or the dual screen segment too. The Moto Razr 5G by the company is proof of that. The smartphone runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 processor paired with 8GB RAM and 128GB internal storage.
The e-ink display is better used with purpose designed apps. To this end, the YotaPhone 2 allows you to setup a selection of apps, realtime clock, news headlines and other information so that they are always available on the secondary display. Alternatively, if you prefer to have some privacy, you can configure a YotaCover, basically like a lockscreen wallpaper, to fill your e-ink display by default.
Despite these drawbacks we remain fans of the YotaPhone 2 rear screen. It offers unique functionality - not only for reading articles and books, but also it can make your phone look different every day thanks to the countless images or patterns you can use as always-on wallpapers, reading eBooks on it is great, and it can extend your battery life a lot.
The YotaPhone 2 is all about dual-screened action. The front display is a pretty standard 5-inch Full HD AMOLED screen with 442 pixels per inch. Colors are punchy and vibrant with good contrast and deep blacks, although viewing angles aren't brilliant and outdoor viewing suffers a little.
This is where the rear touchscreen comes in though. The back display is a 4.7-inch qHD e-paper display with 16 shades of gray scale. Similar to a Kindle display, the back screen is great for reading, outdoor viewing and almost ridiculous battery savings, but more on that later.
YotaPanel lets you get funky: you can add multiple widget screens to the back touchscreen and customize them at will. There are several preset panels, with widgets for weather, social feeds, calendar and appointment schedules, screenshots, frequent contacts, dialer, an e-reader, clock, music controls and screenshot viewer.
The YotaPhone 2 runs near-stock Android 4.4.3 KitKat, so the experience up front is very much like you would find on a Motorola device: stock Android with just a couple of additional elements added in. Besides YotaHub, which provides access to YotaPanel and YotaCover, you've got a couple of pre-loaded Yota apps for the back screen: from an RSS feed and e-book reader to some simple included games like 2048, chess and Sudoku.
Swiping up from the bottom edge on the front screen will provide you two additional shortcuts alongside Google Now: YotaMirror, which will pop your color screen content onto the back display, and a screenshot function which will instantly display whatever was just on the front screen on the back. It's great for having directions, a shopping list or a to-do list always on hand. Flipping between YotaCover and YotaPanel on the back display is a simple matter, courtesy of a pop-up nav bar that disappears with a tap of the screen, and you can swipe between YotaPanels as you normally would.
Depending on which way you are holding the phone, pressing the power button will unlock the uppermost display, and occasionally you will be prompted to flip from the e-ink screen to the full screen, like when you want to read your notifications. This is perhaps my only gripe with the rear screen: the e-ink display will tell me I have three notifications, but I can't see what they are unless I flip the phone over. Likewise things get a little weird with the endless flipping sometimes too; the YotaPhone 2 is not a phone for those with butter fingers.
While I have to admit it does take a little bit of getting used to, once you actually manage to train yourself to use the e-ink display more you find yourself wondering how you ever lived without it. The benefits of an additional, always-on display that persists even if your battery dies cannot be overstated. While you may not go the whole hog and always turn the rear screen on first, the more you use it the better your YotaPhone 2 experience becomes. And the longer your battery lasts.
The YotaPhone 2 specs include a reasonable 2,500 mAh non-removable battery, but as mentioned above, battery life is relative with the YotaPhone 2. Depending on how much you use each display, you can go from four and a half hours of screen-on time up front to 100 hours of e-book reading on the back display.
The YotaPhone 2 release date depends on the particular market you find yourself in, with it already being available in the UK for 555 GBP. The YotaPhone 2 price in the US converts to around 850 USD, but no American release has officially been announced. It should be available very soon in the US though.
The YotaPhone 2 is a vastly improved progression from the first proof-of-concept device. The second e-ink screen on the back is infinitely more useful, with full touch controls and a range of applications, widgets and use cases to take advantage of. While the internal components are a little dated, the YotaPhone 2 is about more than the specs race, introducing a new way of thinking about your smartphone and revolutionizing battery life in the process.
Specs hounds and camera fiends will likely look elsewhere and for good reason, but for those with an adventurous slant to your smartphone tastes, the YotaPhone 2 represents a groundbreaking approach to what we can expect from our smartphones and what our smartphones can actually do. With battery life calculated in days, an always-on touchscreen and the benefits of both a full color and e-ink display, the YotaPhone has many faces, and all of them are worth looking at. It's a three-star phone empowered with a five-star feature and we can't wait to see more. 2ff7e9595c
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