You've never seen a smartphone quite like this before, with full-fledged Android on the front and battery-saving e-ink in the rear.
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LAS VEGAS--I had heard about the YotaPhone, an Android smartphone on one side with an e-ink display on the back, prior to CES, but the confab marked the first time it was shown in the U.S. Gestures navigate you around both sides.
From the front, you use YotaPhone like almost any other Android 4.1 smartphone (L), and when you need to conserve battery power, you flip it over to access information on the low-powered e-ink back (R).
The YotaPhone has a 12-megapixel camera on the rear, a 1.3-megapixel lens on the front, a dual-core processor, and plenty of storage at 32 or 64GB capacities. Or it will, anyway, after it cycles through several prototypes and launches sometime in the latter half of 2013.
In addition to pouring on the e-ink, Yota Devices also wanted to give the YotaPhone some efficiencies, including merging the power button with the SIM card slot.
Look closely and you can see that the phone's back is curved. Before Corning announced Gorilla Glass 3 just before the show, YotaPhone had it custom-make this surface.
