The Yotaphone 2 is a Android phone with a 5 inch color display on one side, and a 4.7 inch E Ink screen on the other. You can use it like a normal phone and flip it over when you want to read an eBook. Or you can send maps, photos, or other content to the black and white screen so they’ll be visible even when the primary screen is off.
Unlike the first-gen Yotaphone, the new model lets you use the E Ink screen for just about anything, so you can even use it to make phone calls, surf the web, or play videos (poorly).
Yota Devices hopes to launch the Yotaphone 2 in the United States later this year. So it’s not surprising that while the company was showing off the dual-screen phone at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, the phone also showed up at the FCC website.
What is a little pleasantly surprising is that while schematics and a few other documents are hidden away for confidentiality purposes, the user manual and internal photos are available: so you can see what the hardware inside this dual-screen smartphone looks like.
To be honest, it looks a lot like what you’d find inside any smartphone… there’s just a second screen on the back.
As for the hardware, we already knew that the phone was powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and a 2500mAh battery.
It has 802.11ac WiFi, an 8MP rear camera, and a 2.1MP front camera. The 5 inch color screen is a 1920 x 1080 pixel AMOLED display, while the E Ink screen is a 4.7 inch, 960 x 540 pixel display that only uses power when the contents displayed on the screen are being refreshed. It’ll continue to display the last image loaded, even if your phone’s battery is completely dead.
The user manual gives a better idea of how to use the always-on display with personalized widgets from the YotaHub app or with other Android apps. You can also answer a call using the always-on display or use a number of apps Yota has designed specifically for that screen.
The model submitted to the FCC runs Android 4.4 KitKat and supports GSM 850/900/1800 /1900 MHz bands and LTE bands 3, 7, and 20. It supports 3G download speeds up to 42 Mbps and LTE speeds up to 150 Mbps.