Hardware & Display
The most striking thing about the YotaPhone 2 is just how normal it seems at first. Just under 9mm thick, massing 145g, and made of dark gray glass-reinforced plastic with a smooth matte finish. The top and bottom edges defined by pronounced curves that recall the Nexus 4 or Nexus S – but it’s at once narrower and sleeker than either, making it very easy to use one-handed. Branding is confined to a small lower-back tattoo.
Despite being the less interesting of the two, the primary display is definitely the better-specced. It’s a 5-inch 1080p panel, with a 442 pixels for every inch and the pronounced contrasts and deep blacks we’re used to seeing from AMOLED technology – though it’s perhaps not as flamboyant as some of Samsung’s prettier efforts. Since the YotaPhone 2’s design dates back to the beginning of 2014, the cover glass here is Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3 rather than the new fourth-generation material – a fact borne out by the hairline scratches already starting to show up on our unit at the one-week mark thanks to some hard drops and scrapes.
To see what really sets the new YotaPhone apart, you’ve got to turn to the back – except there is no back; there’s just another front. The secondary display is also protected by Gorilla Glass 3, but there the commonalities end. The finish is matte instead of gloss, lending it a satiny feel, and the screen beneath trades organic pixels for an E-Paper Display (EPD). At 4.7 inches and 960×540/235ppi, the EPD is both smaller and lower-res than the front panel, and instead of 16 million colors, it offers just 16 shades of gray. It doesn’t have a backlight, it’s flanked by very wide bezels, and like most E-Paper screens it also has a fairly low refresh rate.
The layout of the rear display is fully customizable according to your tastes, too. You can set up to four different “YotaPanels” and move between them by swiping the display horizontally, just like you already do to change home screens on Android. On these panels, you can pin widgets, frequently-used contacts, apps, and phone functions. Dozens of preset widgets come on the phone, including clocks, RSS feeds, weather, calendar, an agenda, mail, SMS, music—everything organized with preconfigured options and fitted on grids that you can tweak.
Battery
The battery charges wirelessly. It’s just 2500 mAh, but still a solid base, given the paltry energy consumption of the electronic paper display. But even if that’s not enough to make it through the day, an energy-saving feature turns on automatically when battery life reaches a (customizable, of course) critical level. The energy-saver limits CPU cycles, turns off NFC, Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular data, account sync, vibration, and haptic feedback, and it can limit the maximum brightness of the AMOLED display and its auto-off timer. Then you can just go back to worry-free tweeting on the back of your phone.
Camera
The YotaPhone 2’s camera isn’t bad – but it’s also nothing special. Here again we see the age of the phone’s design poking through; without a single standout feature, the 8MP sensor with its puny single-LED flash and lack of optical stabilization seems a bit weak for a high-end Android phone in 2015. There’s no special software to speak of; the Google Camera app is the viewfinder Yota went with, and it’s fine.
Bright indoor lighting and daytime photos are also just fine; they’re fairly authentic and sharp enough, assuming you can get the viewfinder to focus properly (autofocus is a little on the slow side). Low-light shots are prone to significant noise and color accuracy problems, but for what it’s worth, we’ve seen worse.
Any distinction here comes courtesy of the YotaPhone’s most standout feature: the EPD. Pressing the rear panel into service as a viewfinder means you can use the primary camera and its LED flash for selfies, rather than the flash-less 2.1MP shooter up front. It’s a little tougher to frame a shot on the EPD due to the low contrast and lack of a backlight, but so few phones offer the ability to easily take a primary-camera selfie that we can’t call this anything but a win.
the YotaPhone 2 is sadly somewhat uneven when it comes to the basics. While its 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, backed up by 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage, is plenty capable of running 3D games and delivering a slick stock Android experience, there’s one major failing: the keyboard. It’s impossible for us to type at high speed on the YotaPhone 2.
With the YotaPhone 2, Yota Devices proves it’s capable of growing a mildly intriguing concept into a compelling and useful product. That makes us very excited for the next generation … and very hopeful for a price cut in the meantime.
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