Once you have the basics right in a smartphone, the focus switches to the additional features you can offer as a manufacturer that makes your hardware stand out from the crowd. For some manufacturers that means working with their own Android skins and first-party apps to create a comfortable and useful software-based environment. For others it’s about the design of the handset and mixing in expected elements with curves, edges, and buttons, to make a great handset that fits in the users' hands. For a few it’s about pushing the envelope by thinking about what can be added to the baseline of hardware that adds utility.

Launched this week in London, the Russian-based Yota Devices has addressed all three of those areas with the Yotaphone 2. The company has developed on top of the stock Google experience with a light touch to provide software that is unique to its handset and makes best use of its vision. It has taken the boxy look of its first smartphone and returned with a curved design that is the equal of many modern smartphones. It has pushed right out of the envelope with its view on making a smartphone that is always working for the users.

…because it has a second screen on the back of the handset.

It’s very easy to wax lyrical about the electronic paper display on the back of the YotaPhone 2. The qHD 960×540 eInk-based screen gives the handset an initial 'wow' factor, and the Russian team has taken all the feedback from the first YotaPhone handset released in late Q4 2013 and applied to its second handset.


That means the eInk screen is larger (up from 640×360 pixels) and the whole screen has a capacitive touch layer — the original just had a touchpad underneath the screen. This increases the utility of the rear screen, and a full touch-screen is a natural way of controlling the handset. It means that the specifications of the handset are high enough that it can be comfortably called Yota Devices' flagship. And it means that there’s a natural lust from anyone following the smartphone market that Yota Devices has brought something mythical to the mix.

Yota has brought something new for consumers in the smartphone world.

This doesn’t mean the device is perfect, and I want to address those flaws first. After that, I’m going to tell you to ignore them and seriously consider the YotaPhone 2 as your next smartphone.

forbes

3 декабря 2014

As I said at the start of this review, all the fancy screens and technology come to nothing if you don’t get the basics right. YotaPhone 2 needs to be a competent and strong Android phone on the regular screen and in normal use. Without that, a user would have to make too many compromises in switching away from an Android device like the Galaxy S5 or the Xperia Z3 (or even the iPhone).

I’m happy to report that the handset does do the basics, although there are one or two caveats that you should be aware of, namely the base hardware specifications and the average camera.

While the YotaPhone is Yota's top device, the specifications aren’t quite up there in 'flagship' territory. It comes with a Snapdragon 800 processor running at 2.2 GHz, backed up by 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage. With a list price of £555 in the UK (£462 / $ 720 before taxes) you would expect a faster and more recent processor backed with more memory. Bringing the cost down in the base hardware allows for a saving to offset the cost of the eInk screen, but you must be aware that this handset is slightly down on power. It also lacks a microSD card to add extra storage.

It’s not a killer blow, these specifications are still going to hand you a smartphone that can handle anything you throw at it, but heavy users are going to hit the limits of the YotaPhone faster than a major handset such as this year’s Moto X.

With the eInk screen hidden, the gentle curves around the corners of the YotaPhone 2 and the Gorilla Glass protected AMOLED screen taking up most of the front of the device, the smartphone looks just like any other Android handset. It’s a large five-inch screened device with some nice curves that fit nicely into your hand. It’s very reminiscent of the Moto X 2013 edition. Unlike the angular brick look of the first YotaPhone, the YotaPhone 2 looks the part of a modern smartphone.

The other consideration is the camera. The YotaPhone 2 comes with two cameras, an eight megapixel autofocus camera on the rear, and a two megapixel camera on the front of the handset. Both of these can be described as 'adequate' without being stunning.

Rather than focus on imaging and creating a great imaging experience, Yota Phone’s designers appear to have decided on leaving the camera as a basic 'point and shoot' operation. The camera requires a lot of light to take great shots. Drift away from the perfect conditions and the YotaPhone 2 struggles to capture accurate colors. The reproduction is washed out and the while balance algorithms need more work.

You’re not buying this handset for the camera, but it is the weakest part of the whole package — even though I love the old-fashioned camera images that pop up on the eInk display to show you are in camera mode, all adorned with a 'smile!' caption.

Yota Devices has rightly used Google’s stock version of Android as much as possible. This was the right thing to do for two reasons. The first is that it has freed up precious engineering time to focus on the software for the eInk screen (more on that in a moment). The second is that because Yota is asking so much of the consumer with the second screen, everything else needs to remain utterly familiar to reduce the cognitive overload.

The first YotaPhone made the mistake of adding the eInk screen and removing the traditional three Android navigation keys (back, home, and apps) for a gesture based panel. Although the rest of the handset remained stock Google, this added a high barrier to the user experience.

This has now been iterated away in the YotaPhone 2. The Android buttons may be soft-keys on the screen, but they are there. From the front 1080p AMOLED screen, everything about the YotaPhone 2 is utterly, predictably, stock Google.

If the YotaPhone 2 was just the AMOLED screen with the associated specifications (and a corresponding drop in price) it would be a perfectly competent mid-range device (albeit one at the very top of the mid-range in terms of capability). I can’t stress that enough, because one of the keys to YotaPhone 2 is that it is a standard Android experience, with access to Google Play services, the full range of third-party apps, and everything that makes Android what it is.

Right, let’s get to the back screen.

Out of the box the YotaPhone 2 comes with a number of specific apps to demonstrate the utility of the eInk screen. Four games are in that bundle (Chess, Checkers, Sudoku, and 2048) and they all benefit from the high contrast paper-like view of the screen. YotaRSS works with Feedly to provide headlines and articles both to the AMOLED main screen, and the ticker widget on the eInk screen But the key to the eInk screen comes from three apps that are the driving force of the second display; YotaCover, YotaPanel and YotaMirror.

YotaCover allows you to set up a wallpaper that shows up on the eInk screen. These can be selected from Yota’s own online catalogue, your own photo albums from VK or Facebook, or from images you have saved or taken on the phone. You can lock in just one photo, or set up a carousel of rotating images.

You also have the option to allow the YotaPhone to show your notifications on the eInk screen, either as an alert number, or as notification strips so you can decide if you need to act on them or not. Given these will always be on display, even if the main screen is off, it means that a glance at the always-on eInk screen will give you a snap overview of your notifications. It’s very efficient, although the process to set it up is a bit hit and miss because the settings dialog in the YotaCover app isn’t particularly clear.

YotaPanel is the equivalent of the widgets you can add to your Android home screen. You can have multiple panels that you can swipe from side to side, and these can be loaded up with a number of widgets designed by Yota to work on the eInk screen. Many of them have secondary full-screen views — for example the Weather widget will present a full screen view of your forecast if you tap on it.

YotaPanels aren’t as flexible as I would have hoped (for example they do not resize), but the assumption is that Yota will be deploying new widgets as they are developed and as partnerships are agreed, so I would expect more choice to be offered in time. It’s also worth nothing that all the major pain points are covered — from a full screen clock, up coming calendar appointments, music players, and notifications, the YotaPanels have a base level of functionality that should suit the vast majority of users.

If that was all there was for the eInk screen, then the YotaPhone 2 would pass muster as a solid Android implementation with some nice ways of alerting you to important parts of your life. But YotaMirror lifts the eInk screen from a souped up alerting to system, to being genuinely useful.

As the name suggested, this app mirrors what would normally be displayed on the main AMOLED screen on the eInk screen. The key thing to remember is that the main power-hungry screen remains off. Yota’s software scales the screen down from HD to qHD, and converts to a 16 scale gray-scale image that can be shown on the eInk screen.
Even if an app is not specifically geared to your YotaPhone’s eInk screen, YotaMirror will allow you to run that app on the back of the device. The question that I answered straight away is "can I use Kindle on the eInk screen?", and while there is no direct Yota app to read Kindle books, using YotaMirror the 'Amazon Kindle for Android' app will show up on the back screen, and the full touch screen will allow me to use it as if it was a regular Android platform… which in a way it is, but with a screen unlike any other.

Again, it’s easy to go 'wow!' but eInk comes with a few drawbacks. The screen is slow to respond, so while the software is quick to pick up touch inputs, there can be a slight delay before you can see the results. It’s also a 16 grey scale screen, and that means color images are rendered in shades of grey. With Google’s aterial Design principles relying on strong blocks of color, this can make for a bit of an eyestrain when you have light text on a colored background. I would like to see a contrast control or even a 'bias to darker' option in the settings to allow the users to tweak the eInk display.

There’s also the simple fact that eInk does have a memory effect, and you can have a ghosting image come through when a screen is updated. After a number of screen updates, the Yota hardware will do a full refresh of the eInk screen which clears any ghosting. It’s not perfect, and part of me wants to accept it simply as 'that's how the technology works' but companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble have worked hard on the ghosting issue in the Kindle and Nook eReaders, so the consumers have a certain level of expectation that YotaPhone 2 doesn’t quite reach.

Finally there’s also the lack of a backlight. I know that the principle behind the YotaPhone 2's eInk screen is to keep power consumption down and an electro-luminescent layer drives up power consumption (as well as thickness and complexity in design) but stepping back from a Kindle Paperwhite to reading on the YotaPhone 2 is a tough step to make.

Nevertheless the eInk screen is a success. Many of the issues are software related and will hopefully be addresses in firmware updates over the next few months (given that Yota Devices has said the YotaPhone 2 will pick up Android 5.0 in the near future there’s at least one update on the way). As it stands it works well, Yota has made the rear screen far more flexible and usable in its second handset than it was on the first handset, and the whole dual-screen combination works well together.

Final Thoughts

On one side, the YotaPhone 2 is a typical mid-range Android device running stock Android. It works, you can rely on it, and there are no surprises. The eInk side of the YotaPhone 2 takes a bit of getting used to, not least because the UI to set everything up feels like it was designed by the engineering team for functionality, rather than working to create a smooth on-boarding procedure.

It does take a little bit of trial and error to get everything set up and to understand what all the options will do. Once you take that time, the eInk side of things works smoothly with very little maintenance required. You just react as required. YotaPhone 2 has clearly shown that a dual-screen form factor is workable, and in many cases desirable.

There is the issue of cost — for the majority of people looking to buy the YotaPhone 2, it’s going to have to be bought as a SIM-free and out of contract phone. With no subsidy the £555 (including taxes) price in the UK will feel steep. You could easily pick up a n equivalently specced Android handset and the latest Kindle or Nook for that price and still have some money left to buy a few books and albums online.

But the YotaPhone 2 is that rare beast — a phone that is radical enough to appeal to the geekerati, but polished and conformist enough that the regular consumers looking for something a little different will feel right at home with the handset. There is a premium to the price, but for the utility on offer, I think it’s a fair premium to pay. There are no hidden gotchas in the design or software, everything is tightly integrated, and YotaMirror’s ability to put anything on the back screen is the killer feature which is the making of the eInk screen.

I’m not done with the YotaPhone 2 just yet. Given the new paradigm of operation, I’m going to continue using it for the next few weeks and let you know how I get on with the handset in a long-term review here on Forbes. But for now I’m happy to recommend this new and innovative smartphone.

"YotaPhone is a crossroads, in many respects, between art and technology. Our goal for the first generation for YotaPhone is to take the learning from these two groups of early fans and to develop a second and third generation of YotaPhone that has mass appeal and commercial success on the global market."

It’s that second phone that will be the difficult next album for the team. There are a number of areas on the original handset that could be improved, and while Martynov isn’t letting anything slip, Mobile World Congress coming up at the end of February and there will be new developments from Yota Devices.

Where does Martynov see Yota Devices in the smartphone world? "We aspire to be an international mobile device manufacturer," he confidently informs me. "But we also want to be a trendsetter in everything we do. I think we are well on our way to achieving both objectives."