Barcelona, Spain — Yota Devices of Russia will come to next week’s Mobile World Congress with what it called the industry’s first two-sided smartphone with color LCD display on one side and electronic-paper display on the other for reading books and magazines.
The company expects its YotaPhone will be available for sale first in Russia and then globally in the second half of 2013.
The 4G LTE Android 4.2 phone accesses Dream Industries’ Bookmate’s e-book store, which offers a monthly flat rate for users to read books online and offline. Russia-based Dream offers 200,000 books in various languages globally. Bookmate “has a global partnership with Yota Phone and will be available in the US when they launch there in due course,” a Dream spokesperson told TWICE.
The e-paper display shows text without requiring users to wake up their phone, and it doesn’t drain a battery as quickly as a color LCD display, Yota said.
The phone features 4.3-inch E Ink display, 4.3-inch HD 1,280 by 720 color LCD display, 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM 8960 CPU, 2,100mAh battery, 12-megapixel main camera and HD front-facing camera.
