Yotadevices has announced they are fleeing Moscow and moving their global headquarters to Toronto. The main reason they are doing this is to tap into a number of former Blackberry engineers and to circumvent the growing number of US trade sanctions levied towards Russia.
This company is mainly known for the YotaPhone, which employed some very unique design principles. It had a high resolution LCD full color touchscreen on the front and an e-ink panel on the back. Users got the best of both worlds, an e-reader and a fully featured phone.
When we reviewed this device in our Good e-Reader Labs, I did not give it a very compelling rating or endorsement. The e-Ink screen frequently crashed and it needed to be interacted with via the D-Pad and physical buttons.
Yota Devices plans to raise $100-million in capital within the next year, with the help of Toronto-based investment bank Jacob Securities, and potentially list the company on the Toronto Stock Exchange by 2015. They also are nearing a global rollout of their second generation Yotaphone with a touchscreen e-ink panel.
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.