The YotaPhone 2 is a smartphone with two screens. There’s a full color screen on one side of the Android phone and a greyscale E Ink display on the other.

Yota Devices already sells the phone in parts of Europe and Asia, and the company hopes to begin shipping to the US and international markets in August, following a successful crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo.

While an unlocked Yotaphone 2 has a retail price of $600, when Yota launched the campaign, the company offered a special deal that let folks snag one for $525 by pledging to the campaign in the first few days.  Now that deal has been extended for a week.

yotaphone 2_02

After the sale ends, you’ll still have a few weeks to save some money on the phone: you can reserve one for a pledge of $550.

The company has raised over $200,000 in the first 8 days of the campaign. That’s not a lot of money when you consider how much it costs to design, manufacture, and distribute a smartphone. But since Yota already has designed phone, Indiegogo provides a way for the company to generate buzz and collect payments before shipping the model internationally.

The relatively high price might be a turnoff for some potential customers though: while there aren’t many other phones with the unique dual-screen solution used in the Yotaphone 2, the rest of the phone’s specs are pretty underwhelming for an Android smartphone in 2015.

It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 2500 mAh battery, 32GB of storage, an 8MP rear camera, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac WiFi, and support for wireless charging and Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0. There’s no microSD card slot.

Waiting for a model with better specs or a lower price tag? Yota tells TechnoBuffalo that both are on the way… hopefully.

The company has plans for a model with a faster processor, more RAM, a better E Ink display, and a thinner design. But the Yotaphone 3 specs won’t be finalized until closer to the time it’s ready to ship… and that will only happen if Yota Devices can sell enough Yotaphone 2 models to make a next-gen model feasible.

Meanwhile the company is also considering launching model called the YotaPhone 2c which could leave out some of the features found in the YotaPhone 2 in order to sell at a lower price. For example, it could have a 720p color display instead of a 1080p screen, and leave out some of the other features such as wireless charging.

 

 

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