Welcome to a new segment from Good e-Reader, Throwback Thursday! Every week we will look at a piece of technology with E INK screens that brought something new to the table or were relevant in some way. Today, we take a look at the unboxing experience for the Yotafone 2, one of the very first dual screen E INK smartphones.
The Yotaphone 2 came out in 2014 and featured a 5 inch AMOLED front screen with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 and 442 PPI. The rear facing E INK Pearl screen is 4.7 inches and has a resolution of 540 x 960 pixels and 235 PPI.
Underneath the hood is a 2.3 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad core processor with 2 GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. The rear facing camera has 8MP and shoots video in 1080p and the front-facing camera is 2.1 MP. It can connect up to WIFI and also various carrier networks, it is powered by a 2500 mAh battery and has Bluetooth 4.0.
The retail packaging is all black and on the front is the Yotaphone logo in silver. The back of the box has a PCMAG rating, in black. When you open the box it opens up in 3 different storage bays, a very interesting way of keeping everything neatly intact. The first has the headphones and USB, the other one has the phone and underneath that is the documentation. The third bay has the wall charger.
The entire point of the YotaPhone 2’s existence is the second display on the back. It uses e-ink technology, which isn’t backlit like typical LCDs and only uses power when it refreshes what’s on screen. It’s therefore incredibly power efficient. You’ll find e-ink screens on Amazon’s Kindles, whose batteries can last up to a month on a single charge. The front facing screen is primarily used for gaming, messaging or anything else you want to do on Android 4.4.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
