Nothing works harder to kill your smartphone’s battery life than the display. That big, bright, full color screen sucks power like crazy, which is one reason why many modern smartphones can run for a day or two if you’re just listening to music, but die in a matter of hours when you’re surfing the web or watching videos.

The Yotaphone is a smartphone designed to conquer that problem by giving you two screens: when you don’t need full color, you can just flip the phone over and use a grayscale, low power E Ink screen.

Yotaphone

Yota Devices had already promised the phone would ship in December, and now it looks like it’ll be very early in the month — CNET reports Yota will hold a launch event in Moscow on December 4th.

Not only does the ePaper screen consume less electricity, but since it relies on ambient light instead of a backlight, it’s easy to see in direct sunlight or other bright environments — there’s pretty much no glare.

The dual-display setup is what makes the Yotaphone special, but the rest of the specs don’t look bad. There’s a 4.3 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel color LCD on one side and an E Ink 640 x 360 pixel screen on the other, 2GB of RAM, a Snapdragon S4 Pro dual-core CPU, a 13MP rear camera, 1MP front camera, WiFi, GPS, LTE, and an 1800mAh battery.

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4 replies on “Yotaphone dual-screen, E Ink smartphone launches Dec 4th (in Russia)”

  1. aw, e-ink side isn’t a full touch screen 🙁 I would’ve liked it if you could just essentially switch the primary display from the LCD to the e-ink for things like walking directions, web browsing and such. ATM you have to use the LCD as a primary and then essentially send screenshots to the e-ink

  2. Didn’t OLPC come up with a black and white mode that uses less power and usable in the sun. I wonder why that particular technology has never made it to smartphone or tablets.

  3. good concept! a lil on the expensive side, but that tends to sort itself out, we’ll get one later, after the price dropped to reasonable levels…

  4. nice idea poor execution. $675 for basically a middle of the road cellphone with an e-ink display… pass

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