Hands-on: the next generation YotaPhone [VIDEO]

For those of you who followed last year’s coverage of Mobile World Congress might remember a unique little smartphone called the YotaPhone. The brain child of a small Russian startup, the YotaPhone was an interesting device crazy enough to combine a stock Android experience with the power of an e-ink display on its back. The results were nothing short of magical, making the YotaPhone one of our favorite devices from MWC last year.

With mobile technology seemingly plateauing at the moment, you can either slap more cores into a device, or try and think outside the box and come up with something truly useful. This is exactly what the folks at YotaPhone did after successfully launching the first generation device in select markets back in December. This year, YotaPhone is back again with an all new, spruced up model for 2014.

Let’s be honest, last year’s YotaPhone was a bit of an eyesore. For 2014, the next-gen YotaPhone is a far more visually appealing device, mixing equal parts beauty and function. It’s like those teenage movies where the sweet nerdy chick gets a hot new makeover. For those only interested in raw specs, here’s what the upcoming YotaPhone 2 is packing under the hood:

YotaPhone 2014 specs

Software

Because the YotaPhone is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in Android (or mobile for that matter), it takes a suite Yota’s specialty apps to get the secondary e-ink display working with the software. Apps for calendar, to-do lists, wallpapers, social networks, RSS feeds and so forth were all created specifically to beam to the back of the device, where they’ll remain, always visible, even if the phone runs out of battery and is powered down. Epic.

Besides always displaying information at a glance, the back e-ink display is also touch activated. Normally locked, a gesture can unlock the touch screen functionality, allowing users to read through RSS feeds, scroll through tweets, or flip through the pages of their favorite book. When taking a pic, the back of the device displays an old fashioned camera, displaying the picture to the subject immediately after it’s been snapped.

Battery drain

It’s not hard to see the benefits a secondary e-ink display offers users. A significant amount of our device’s battery drain comes from simply powering our battery hungry displays. Checking Facebook, Twitter, or other notifications begins to take a toll. With e-ink, virtually no battery is required to keep an app displayed with YotaPhone promising up to 50 hours of battery life in stand-by mode with e-ink activated. Simply place the device on your desk and at a glance, you’ll always be up to date with whatever is going on in your life, be it work or play.

Availability

With the first generation YotaPhone, the smartphone startup mentioned the device was more or less an experiment, meant to test the waters and gauge consumer demand for their device. YotaPhone understands that early adopters might not be as receptive to the announcement of a newer, improved YotaPhone only a few months after the original was released. This is why Yota is promising a “generous” trade-in program for first generation YotaPhone buyers looking to upgrade to the new model when it hits the market Q4 of this year.

YotaPhone coming to the US?

When it comes to US availability, don’t expect to find the YotaPhone at your local carrier store but don’t let that get your hopes down. Even without carriers chomping at the bit for the device, Yota did promise a US compatible version of the device to launch within a few months after it launches in Europe. That’s still quite a ways off, so whether or not you’ll want one by then remains to be seen.
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