Gadgetory

do you like the idea of having your phone constantly display notifications but don't want your battery life to drain away in hours if so the yotaphone might be up your street it's an Android smartphone with a regular 4.3 inch LCD on one side and an e-ink second display on the other having two screens might seem like a bizarre concept but it's not actually a bad idea ink displays aren't backlit like lcds and don't constantly refresh so that use only a tiny amount of power instead of having your battery destroying LCD screen always showing notifications you can instead see them appear on the rear ink display which remains always on the second screens not just for notifications either you can view your Twitter and Facebook feeds use it to display photos to personalize your phone and use it as an e-book reader as you would with an Amazon Kindle certainly an interesting idea but the yotaphone is far from perfect for while the e-ink display is pretty poor quality making small text look fuzzy and it has a nasty habit of showing a faint ghost of the previous image every time it refreshes crucially though there's very little software that's designed to work with the second screen yotaphone has access to its own ebook store but it's woefully under stucked and more popular services like kindle or Kobo won't work properly on the e-ink screen your Facebook and Twitter feeds can be shown by a yota phone's internet hub application it shows a very basic feed which you need to load up on the main screen before flipping around to the back which is the rather clunky process I also found the fees wouldn't automatically update with new posts there's a Notes app that will show up on the back which I found quite handy for keeping shopping lists permanently on screen while trawling the food aisles the rest of the phone isn't going to excite mysterious tech fans among you it's screen has an acceptable 1280 by 720 pixel resolution as an underwhelming 1.7 gigahertz dual-core processor under the hood and it's all wrapped up in a rather chunky plain looking body there are no physical navigation keys on the front instead you make your way around by performing a series of gestures on a touch panel beneath the screen it's not an ideal solution as you of course need to actually remember what each gesture does I also found the panel to be a bit unresponsive forcing me to repeat the gesture more carefully on numerous occasions on the back of the phone is a 13 megapixel camera the 02 phones really ink screen provides a handy way of being able to always see notifications or read ebooks without destroying your battery life as a concept I'm definitely sold but the poor quality of a display the lack of third-party support the second screen apps and the underwhelming specs all-round means this attempt just isn't up to scratch if your phone can use a better quality e ink display and work much more closely with developers its next-generation device might well be worth checking out I'm Andrew Hoyle for cnet and this is the yotaphone