CES 2015: Russian Yota Smartphone Boasts 2 Displays

CES 2015 spotlights smartphones coming from all kinds of places, including Moscow, where mother-company Yota Devices is partially owned by the Russian government. Shown in the E-Ink booth at CES, the YotaPhone, as its called, is not yet available in the US, and it's a good thing, since that gives Apple, Samsung and the other big contenders time to catch up. In its second generation, the YotaPhone is almost up to snuff in software (the first generation showed last year was sorely wanting in stability and apps). But by the time it is introduced in the US later in 2015, the Android-based phone should be a winner, even if the other big guys counter with similar models by them.

The biggest differentiator is that the YotaPhone has not only a standard color LCD screen on the front, but also has a zero-power E-Ink display on its back, allowing clock, weather, number of emails, messages, and so forth to be constantly displayed while drawing almost no power. In fact, if you use the E-Ink display exclusively you can read books for 100 hours without recharging, listen to music, and surf the web for up to 48 hours, and surf the web constantly for up to 24 hours straight without a recharge.

The front has a 5-inch touchscreen display with 1,920-by-1,080-pixel resolution, while the backside has a 4.7-inch grey scale E-Ink screen, similar to those found in an e-reader. Unfortunately, because of the two displays it comes in at 8.9 millimeters (0.35 inches) thick compared with 6.9 millimeters (0.27) inches for the iPhone 6.

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