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Earlier this year, a prototype of a dual e-ink and LCD phone was floating around. Turns out it’s much further down the development road than that, though — and in fact it should be available next year.
Manufactured by a Russian company called Yota Devices, this is an Android phone at heart. But unlike other phones, into its frame is crammed both a 4.3-inch 720 x 1,280 LCD display on the front and a 200 dpi e-ink display of the same size on the rear.
Elsewhere, Yota has released details of the guts that lurk inside, too: a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 processor, 2GB of RAM, at least 32GB of storage, LTE, a 12-megapixel rear camera, and a 720p front-facing camera. Despite having two screens, Yota claims it’s less than 10mm thick. This things sounds none too shabby.
Yota also claims to be planning to make more use of the e-ink display than reading. It explains that it will route data to the second screen whenever it makes sense in an attempt to increase battery life — by up to 50 per cent, or so it claims. How well that will work in practice — and how much users will appreciate it — is another question entirely.
Which brings us to a couple of major question marks. First, it’s unclear who exactly would want a dual display phone like this: reading’s a very specific application, after all, usually best done on a slightly-larger-than-phone-size screen. Second, Yota hardly has a track record in device manufacturing, so if it’s selling a phone based on a dual-screen gimmick, it’s not necessarily clear that the rest of device will be up to scratch.
But! Only time — and a play with the thing — will tell as far as that final point’s concerned. Yota is aiming for a launch in the third quarter of 2013. [Engadget]
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And that is why Yota Devices will remain Yota Devices.
I can see twisted spiral Galaxies from Samsung reaching before this comes out next year.
I actually think this idea has some legs, I could see this working.
I was thinking great when I read the header. But I was thinking that it was integrated screen technology – shame.
If they sandwiched e-ink and oled into one screen and was able to filter them on/off then that would be sweet. Or you could maybe do a 600 ppi screen with 50% of each pixel type and toggle between them. Or do an e-ink based colour oled with a feature of knocking the back lighting off – I can see one of those three solutions making for a better solution than this. I’ll have a hybrid screen please, two screens? Nah.
Seems they exist already but at bigger sizes with poorer pixel counts, but doable: http://pixelqi.com/our_screens.
3M also do a transparent solar film, throw a layer of that in the mix and you have one screen that has touch screen, backlight screen, e-ink and solar charger all in one – don’t know if the solar has heat issues but you just need trickle charge while sitting on the desk or in use – even if it gets 30% extra on the standard battery use it would be worth the extra effort and cost. Patent pending.
Could help stretch battery life….
A transparent OLED ontop of a E-INK display would be amazing.
I can confirm that a lot of Russians like to read on public transport, and a significant number of them use their mobile phones. This looks like it could be a pretty big seller in Russia. Yota is also a 4G provider, and is one of only two 4G providers currently operating in Russia (although others have been approved), so there’ll probably be a decent tie-in package.