Price: Dh1,699. Available at Jumbo
What sets the wedge-shaped YotaPhone (pictured above) apart from other Android smartphones is the Kindle-like e-paper screen on its back. Like a slightly sharper Nintendo Gameboy, the screen only offers images and text in varied shades of grey and black. This makes it excellent for long-form reading.
Footnotes can be made on a text and appear on the YotaPhone’s primary 16.7-million colour LCD screen, based on what section of a book you’re on — an excellent tool for higher level reading. Another useful feature of the second screen is whatever is on it when the phone’s battery dies remains, which is great for keeping essential data such as e-tickets and maps or whatever you would like to save as a screenshot – and it is easily done by swiping two fingers down on the LCD.
However, while you can go through pages like a breeze during the day, the lack of a back light renders the e-paper side of the phone useless in the dark. The control function for this side of the screen will confuse many users and has an unnecessary associated learning curve — with a single bar you need to swipe at the bottom of the screen, not quite as responsive as it should be. Yota missed a trick with this – it would have been amazing to browse text-heavy articles on the e-paper screen without having to flip the phone over.
The LCD screen offers a crisp picture and the device’s Qualcomm Snapdragon processor delivers an error-free gaming experience, with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean coming out of the box. If you’re looking for KitKat, you’ll have to wait a while.
However, as with the e-reader screen, the lack of buttons feels a bit strange. The 140g device, which measures 7.3 by 9.9 inches, offers a solid, but unremarkable 13-megapixel camera and a HD selfie cam on its front. When taking a picture, the e-paper screen displays, somewhat gaudily, the word “Smile!”.
At its price, the YotaPhone is veering into iPhone territory, and that makes it more expensive than other Android devices. For what is an unknown brand outside Russia, Yota is banking on its e-paper screen to pull in buyers — something evident by the phone-maker’s website, which dedicates the entire product page to a single hardware feature — but will buyers bite?
