Dual-screen Smartphone YotaPhone 2 is Coming in December

Remember YotaPhone, a dual-screen phone with an LCD screen on one side and an e-ink one on the other? Russia’s Yota announced its successor, the YotaPhone 2, back in February 2014, but now it finally has a release date — December 2014.

While the company’s website currently only sports the aforementioned release time frame and an image of the phone (we had a hands-on with an early prototype at the 2014 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona), Android Police has some more info about the upcoming device.

The YotaPhone 2 should go on sale in 20 European countries in December, at the price of 33,000 Rubles or approx. $610. It will have a 5-inch AMOLED screen on one side and a 4.7-inch e-ink touchscreen on the other. Other specs of note include a Snapdragon 800 processor, an 8-megapixel rear camera and 32 GB of storage.

And while the exact date of availability was not announced, the company will be opening its first YotaPhone flagship store in London on Dec. 3, presumably with YotaPhone 2 in stock.

The original YotaPhone, while an extremely interesting device, had a number of shortcomings — except for a tiny strip at the bottom, the e-ink screen was not touch-sensitive; software was all sorts of flaky, and some design decisions, such as the position of the rear camera in the lower left corner, were far from ideal.

The YotaPhone 2 promises to fix most of those issues. If Yota manages to polish its software, it could be one of the most exciting devices of the year.

Author: Stan Schroeder

Source: Mashable