Sure, you can look at the business side of bringing a new smartphone to market or which specs are needed to make sure it sells to the right demographics, but in the end, these little devices are machines in the palm of our hand designed to keep us connected to the world, are a bit soul-less.

A company out of Russia, Yota Devices, known for making really fast, sleek modems, decided it was time to make a smartphone with a bit more emotion in it and wasn’t going to be built on specs that ignored the always-on, mobile lifestyle that has become our every day lives.
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, Yota Devices gave us the world’s first two-sided screened Android phone. It’s like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of phones — e-reader (e-ink screen) and smartphone all in one.

Yes you heard, two sides. One side looks just like your trusty smartphone — but the back side, is an e-reader, like a Kindle.
"Everyone out there wants to beat each other on specs, no one is taking risks anymore when making a smartphone," said Vlad Martynov, CEO, Yota Devices. "Everyone is doing the same thing and we wanted to make a gadget with a soul. A smartphone that fits our lives the way we live them now, not a decade ago."

So, why change the way you interact with smartphone? Why not. We carry them with us 24/7, we take photos with them, we stay connected to our digital lives, we listen to music, we look at videos, watch TV, they are surrogates for airline boarding passes, we keep our entire lives on them, we sometimes even make a phone call on them. As Martynov, says, we don’t use them the way we used to when they came to market.

According to analyst firm Strategy Analytics, there are more than one billion smart phones in the market at the close of Q3 2012. But here’s something interesting to think about. That growth was 16 years in the making and according to Strategy Analytics, that’s about one in seven of the world’s population. But in the rest of the world, and in emerging markets like China, India and Africa, they don’t own smartphones in large numbers yet. Strategy Analytics predicts that the next billion smartphone numbers will be reached in less than three years.

So, the smartphone marketing booming and expected to grow faster than it took for them to emerge on the scene and we live in an always-on social network world — switching between Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, Path and others. We move from app to app, closing, opening, constantly multi-tasking between the apps on our devices. Why not just leave that social stream going? Keep your digital life running on the back while you engage in the real world or get back to work on the smart phone side — emailing, calling, checking in, etc.

This is exactly with the new smartphone from Yota Devices lets you do -- keep working on one side but leave your digital life, or anything else you want running on the other side -a book, texting, airline boarding passes, etc. Even texting gets more personal on this new device, it can recognize words through a sentiment filter and turns them into photos that display on the e-reader side of the phone.

Say you have a book open on the e-reader side, say its Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. You see a passage or quote you want to share with your friends — all you have to do is highlight it and hit send and off it goes to your digital universe.

forbes

5 марта 2013