Dual Display YotaPhone officially announced in Malaysia

Innovation for smart phones seem to have slowed down and most devices these days are looking very much the same. If you’re looking for something more radical, the YotaPhone that comes with two displays has finally arrived in Malaysia.

On one side, you get your typical screen which is a 4.3-incher that does HD 720p resolution. The killer feature is on the back where you’ll find an always on 4.3″ e-ink display which works like a Kindle. The benefits of having such display is its power efficiency and better visibility under outdoor sunlight. It basically uses no power at all unless the screen is being refreshed, which is very practical for reading, displaying passes, maps and static images.

For now, they are bringing their first generation YotaPhone instead of the latest next generation YotaPhone that was introduced during MWC 2014. Fortunately Yota Devices have given it an upgrade and instead of dated Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, they have refreshed it with a newer Snapdragon 400 unit. The YotaPhone will be priced at RM1,699 and it is available for pre-order today at Globalline. For today only, those who pre-order will get a 4D/3N holiday package to Bali or you can get it standalone for RM1,399.

UPDATE: To get it for RM1,399, enter the promo code “dualscreen”.

To recap on the specs, the first gen Yota Device will be running on a dual-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon 400 processor that’s mated with 2GB of RAM. On-board it will come with a decent 32GB of on-board storage.

Going back to the display, the front gets an 4.3″ IPS LCD panel that does 1280×720 pixels resolution which gives a pixel density of 342ppi. For the back, the 4.3″ E-ink display does 640×360 pixels resolution and unlike the next generation YotaPhone, it isn’t touch enabled. For navigation, you can swipe and tap on the touch pad located under the E-ink display. According to YotaDevices, you can use the YotaPhone solely on the rear display up to 50 hours on a single charge. There are several apps including maps, appointments and notifications being supported for the rear display, making it useful for your frequently used activities. YotaDevices has also released its SDK to allow 3rd party developers to utilise the E-ink display.

If you need to push anything from the main screen to the back, just perform a twin swipe by dragging 2 fingers from the top to bottom of the front screen, and it will push the content onto the E-ink display. As a result, this should prolong the overall battery life while having an always-on display.

For imaging, the front gets a 1MP camera while the back features a 13MP auto focus camera that shoots Full HD 1080p video and it is assisted with LED flash. Powering the device is 1,800mAh capacity battery and overall it weighs 146g with a thickness of 9.9mm. In terms of connectivity you get Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi 802.11n and 4G LTE connectivity supporting our local Band 3 and 7. At the moment, it runs on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean.

For more information, you can head over to YotaPhone’s product page or click here to place an order.

YotaPhone Hands-on Photos

YotaPhone Promo Images and Videos