While
smartphones these days are stuffed to gills with powerful technology,
design-wise, it would not be far-fetched to state that companies are
unwilling to push the boundaries and actually take a risk, though recent
launches like Blackberry Passport (Review | Pictures) and Lenovo Vibe X2 (Review | Pictures) have managed to
buck that trend. Another exception that particularly caught our fancy is
the YotaPhone made by a Russian broadband service provider Yota
Devices.
The YotaPhone has what the company claims, "The world's
first dual-screen smartphone with an always-on display." We are
definitely intrigued by the ingenuity of this particular device to the
point that we were left wondering why couldn't someone else think of
this before!
Before we get to the review, do bear in mind that
this is the first version of the YotaPhone that the company unveiled at
CES 2012. In India, the YotaPhone is being sold by Jumbo Electronics
exclusively via Flipkart. It's also worth noting that Yota Devices has
already unveiled the next iteration of the YotaPhone, which will be
unsurprisingly called YotaPhone 2, and it is all set for a December
launch in London. Obviously, the YotaPhone 2 betters it predecessors in a
lot of ways and we will try to get hands on one when it is launched
here. But until then, lets find out if the first generation YotaPhone
still has the chops to create a stir in India.
Look and feel
We
really want to give the YotaPhone full marks for innovation for its
design because it turned heads every single time we pulled the phone out
of the pocket. People were curious about the second screen and we were
happy to oblige with an explanation.
The rear of this phone is
made of 4.3-inch curved e-ink display and if reports are to be believed
Yota Devices commissioned Corning to create a special curved Gorilla
Glass 3 to be added for additional protection. The company did this
right before showcasing the phone at CES 2012. One problem we faced in
our time with the phone is that the curved rear actually made the phone
feel bottom heavy. Also, the soft plastic edges around the matte rear
can't do much to prevent the phone from slipping.
This e-ink
display is not touch sensitive and there is a touch panel right below
it, which accepts swipes and taps for navigation. The rear camera and
flash is quite oddly placed at the bottom of the rear (below the
screen), which is an inconvenience because our fingers invariably
covered the camera while trying to click a picture. However, this might
be less of a problem as one uses the YotaPhone for longer durations.
Additionally, there is a slit for a speaker at the bottom.
Turn
the phone around and things start looking more familiar. The nondescript
front is dominated by a 4.3-inch screen, with copious bezels
surrounding all the sides. There is a front camera and an earpiece above
this screen. Below it lies another touch panel, like the one on its
rear, which can again be used for navigation. A Micro-USB port lies at
the bottom and is accompanied by a microphone. The volume rocker lies on
the left edge of the phone. The power button has curiously been placed
on the Micro-SIM card tray - it doesn't have good travel and feels very
soft to use as well. On the top, one can also find the 3.5mm jack and
another microphone.
Dual Displays
The main display on the
YotaPhone is 4.3-inch primary screen IPS LCD panel with a resolution of
720x1280, which is really good because it translates to a pixel density
of 342ppi. It is a very crisp display with a good amount of saturation
but we noticed that the whites had a very warm tone to the extent that
the screen looked really yellow. The viewing angles were great and the
sunlight legibility was really good too. All in all, we really liked
this display.
The highlight of the device is of course the rear
4.3-inch e-ink panel has a display resolution of 360x640 pixels, which
translates to a pixel density of 170ppi. In comparison, the cheapest
Amazon Kindle's screen has a pixel density of 167ppi. This screen
displays 16-grayscale colours just like the display on the Kindle. We
checked both the screens together and noticed that the Kindle's screen
was only slightly sharper but the YotaPhone screen still gets the work
done.
We had no problem in sifting through the pages of H.G.Wells'
classic novel Time Machine thanks primarily to the fact that an e-ink
display is the only technology at the moment that comes close to
emulating the characteristics of real paper. The additional benefit is
that, despite being an always-on display, it actually consumes less
power than an LCD screen which in turn can help save battery life. Our Amazon
Kindle
review
talks about the e-ink displays in general and in more detail.
Apps need to
be updated to utilise this additional display for things other than
notifications, which are handled by the system software. More on this
later in this review.
Specifications and camera
According to
YotaPhone's official website and Flipkart's online listing of the phone
it is supposed to be packing a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC clocked at 1.7GHz.
We generally use a software called CPU-Z to double-check the
specifications and quite surprisingly it showed that the phone is
actually using a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro clocked at 1.73GHz. The
model number it showed was QCT MSM8960 CDP. Incidentally, Yota Devices
used the Snapdragon S4 Pro in the initial build of the YotaPhone. We got a confirmation from Jumbo
Electronics that the phone uses the MSM8960 chip but the company
categorically stated that it is running Snapdragon 400. However, Qualcomm's official website states that the Yotaphone uses a Snapdragon S4 Pro processor (MSM8960 Pro). In any case, we
have benchmark numbers for our readers in the performance section.
The phone has
2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage space with no provision for
adding more space using a memory card. YotaPhone has a 13-megapixel rear
camera and a 1-megapixel front-facing camera. The Micro-SIM card inside
the phone can connect to 3G networks and LTE as well but it does not
support the 2.3GHz band on which the Indian networks operate. An 1800mAh
battery powers the phone.
The 13-megapixel rear camera can take
some decent shots in daylight. We noticed that the images are quite
sharp and the software processing manages to keep noise at a bare
minimum. Having said that, we did catch some purple fringing around the
edges. The lens blows out the highlights but this can be overcome a bit
using the HDR mode. Weirdly, in the HDR mode we couldn't get the lens to
autofocus however hard we tried - it's not clear if this is a software
issues or a problem specific to our unit.
(click for full size)
In low-light, the camera
captures images which have a lot of noise to the point we'd suggest not
using this camera in low-light. The camera app used by the YotaPhone is
the one Google introduced with its Ice Cream Sandwich update, which we
personally find unintuitive. Of course this can be easily fixed by
downloading one of the many third-party apps from Google Play.
Software
The
YotaPhone is running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, which is quite evidently
outdated. But, please remember that Yota Devices unveiled the phone in
2012 and at that time it was running the latest Android 4.1 OS. We are
unsure if the company has plans to update the software to Android 4.4.
KitKat or 5.0 Lollipop anytime soon, but it seems highly unlikely at
this moment considering the YotaPhone 2 is already being prepped for
launch. The phone is running mostly stock Android save for the inclusion
of a few apps made for working with the rear screen. Apart from this,
there is absolutely no bloatware, which is a great thing.
Yota
Devices adds front touch panel in place of buttons. To navigate through
the OS it makes use of a combination of swipes and taps on this panel. A
single swipe to the left acts as the Back function while the exact
opposite can be used to get back Home. Double tapping on the centre
opens Recents. While both the swipe functions worked absolutely fine
every single time, finding the sweet spot for double tapping was an
exercise in frustration - again something that might get better as you
use the phone everyday. Thankfully, the phone has an option to use
on-screen capacitive buttons as an alternative but it takes up a bit of
the screen estate.
The touch panel on the rear also works in a
similar fashion. Swiping to the right or the left unlocks the screen. To
dismiss a notification one has to swipe to the left. While reading, you
can swipe left or right to flip through pages. Double tapping on the
panel opens the wallpaper. Swiping from the top of the front takes a
screenshot and displays it on the back. The swipes and taps take time to
register, and there is a perceptible lag that can make it rather
annoying to use initially. However, e-ink panels are not meant to be as
touch sensitive as traditional displays, and once you teach yourself not
to be as demanding, it gets a little better. Still, switching between
the two displays - one with great touch response, and the other not so
much - can be a frustrating experience.
A few proprietary apps
that make use of the rear screen are Wallpaper, Organiser, Internet Hub,
TeachMe, Notepad, Bookmate and MapsWithMe. Wallpaper is, as you'd
guess, used to change the wallpaper of the display. Organiser is a
calendar app that can be used to display your daily meetings/tasks on
the rear screen. One can sift through the days using left/ right swipes
on the touch panel or clicking the volume rocker. Internet hub is a
collection of feeds, including Facebook and Twitter feeds, that can be
displayed on the rear screen.
TeachMe is an app that can be used
to learn languages like Russian, German, Spanish, Italian and a few
more. Notepad displays your recent notes on the rear screen. Yota
Devices has tied up with Bookmate to display e-books on the rear screen
and it comes in quite handy. While we would have really loved an
integration with Amazon's Kindle app, we know that it is too much to ask
for. MapsWithMe is probably the most unintuitive app of the lot and we
struggled to use it while on the move. However, if you are going on a
long drive and will need to be seeing maps along the way with minimal
interaction, it's great to have an option to view them on a display that
uses minimal battery rather than a conventional one.
The e-ink display can also show incoming notifications but they aren't actionable because of the lack of a touchscreen.
Performance
Keeping
the benchmark numbers aside for a bit, we think the phone was generally
zippy to use and it can even play the latest high-end games smoothly
without any lags. We tried Dead Trigger 2 and Shadowgun, and both the
games worked flawlessly, thanks to the presence of the fairly powerful
Adreno 320 GPU. This is further corroborated by the GFXbench and 3D Mark
Ice Storm (<=720p) tests in which YotaPhone achieved scores of
24.7fps and 9,957 respectively. In AnTuTu 5 and Quadrant the phone
managed to log 26,900 and 6,835 respectively. Please note that these
numbers are indicative of the MSM8960 chip inside the phone.
The
phone also played all our test videos, which also included a highly
encoded 40mbps file, without skipping frames or any lag. The bundled
headset sounds fine for most purposes but using a better pair is
advisable. The speakers are adequately loud and don't crackle at maximum
volume. The sound quality in calls is pretty good and we didn't face
any call drops either. In our battery test the phone lasted us 5 hours
and 46 minutes, which is pretty average by any standards. If users can
find a way to use the rear screen effectively then they can definitely
squeeze more juice out of the inbuilt battery.
Verdict
In
our opinion, the first generation YotaPhone is high on innovation but
the execution could've been better. Like we mentioned before, we like
the e-ink display for reading books, but we wish there were more apps
that could use the same. It's especially difficult to recommend the
YotaPhone when a better device is around the
corner, where Yota Devices is likely to address at least some of the
shortcomings of the device.
Despite the innovation, the first generation
YotaPhone feels more like an experiment, an experiment we cannot
recommend as a purchase unless you are in an absolute urgency to buy a
phone with an e-ink display and cannot wait for the YotaPhone 2 to hit
Indian markets. The rest can probably pick up a Moto G (Gen 2) and an
Amazon Kindle for the e-ink display.
Yota Devices YotaPhone in pictures 
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