Yotaphone 2 Review!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enMerry Christmas guys you may remember last month I got a chance to see the launch of the Yota phone 2 it's in brief time with the device and now I finally got my hands on it I'm excited to see just how good this device is outside of the showroom and whether that novelty this e in display still exists outside of that space so today we are going to take a look at the Yota phone 2 the design of the Yota phone 2 surprises me there are no markings adorning the front of the device which immediately gives it a more sophisticated look which is personally what I like to see on devices the glass that sits on it is flat but the surrounding frame and the shape of the phone accentuates this flatness the whole device sees curves everywhere the top bottom sides and back the device has a shallow gray tonality to it and this fits in well with what is yotaphone 2's headline feature the rear always on E in display the bezel and back blend into the matte e in display well and makes the whole presentation look natural for something that is quite unnatural if someone saw the back of the device it could easily be mistaken for the front whilst it does feel better holding it the normal way up it doesn't feel bad holding it upside down the device has a magnesium chassis with a glass fiber reinforced plastic outer surface both panels are covered in Corning Gorilla Glass 3 which should prove useful for the rear display as it will be the side most susceptible to scratches and scuffs the autophone 2 comes in at 8.95 MM at its thickest point 14 44.9 mm tall and 69.4 mm wide this all results in the device weighing at 145 G the Nexus 5 here is a good comparison as the two phones are very similar in terms of size the Nexus 5 is 8.6 mm thin and comes in at 130 G an imperceptible difference for something good to compare to regardless looking around the device we have the headphone port at the top the left hand side is void of any buttons or markings on the right hand side we have the standby button and above that we have the volume rocker which in this case doubles as the nano SIM card slot this may be a technical justification for having a screen on the back but the resulting effect is a slight mushiness to the button presses to some this may not matter but coming from ceramic keys on an exus 5 there is a tangible difference finally we have a single speaker on the bottom even though there are grills indicating two which is a shame really and we're left with the micro USB connection to finish it off there is no denying that Yota have done a good job incorporating two screens into a device that feels remarkably similar to nearly every other phone out there the display on the Yota phone 2 well two displays are both good the front panel is an adequately bright 5in full HD AMOLED display the white balance is not too cold nor too warm which is good and thusly provides a good experience but it does slightly lean towards a green tin the Nexus 5 again in comparison is slightly more red there is no color shift at extreme angles and the yotaphone 2 only shows the slightest or contrast shifts at these extreme angles it's a pleasing experience overall but I'm sure sure you're interested to hear about the eink display modern smartphones and their screens use a lot of power so the 4.5 in eink touchscreen display should make for a highly efficient one as it only uses power when refreshing the panel comes in at 960x 540 with 16 levels of gray scale which in this case is surprisingly crisp the concept of having two screens on a phone feels unnatural and will take a bit of getting used to Yoto recommend using the eink panel as much as possible to save that much more battery life but this will require a change of habit this change wouldn't be as jarring if it weren't for the refresh rate and the responsiveness of the in in display it's good but it's slow and can feel slow to register presses and for those presses to even take effect more often than not you also get that flicker the slowness doesn't bother me so much but here you're trying to use the back panel as if it was the front and that hurts the display we have certain expectations using devices in this sort of manner it's a trade-off at the end of the day and I'm sure Yota had to balance design and usability despite any usability issues with the eink display it still looks great pictures look great especially black and white images and Yoto have done well to manipulate the display to make it work with the rear eing panel a word of warning though the display won't be sufficient for those looking to do anything more than reading or using slower paced apps watching videos and playing games won't be a good experience at all the e in display works best if you're using for glanceable info and notifications you can answer calls check to see if you have any emails texts and it's surprising how good that feature is especially when such a technology is based around the ecosystem of your phone the best part of this e Inc display is that it works great outdoors long have we lived for this powering the two displays we have the Snapdragon 800 running at 2.2 GHz the phone has 2 gigs of RAM and comes standard with 32 GB of storage it's a curious choice for sure but it doesn't hurt the device as the phone runs fine most of the time when curious hit to the performance was the keyboard trying to type often resulted in some sort of lag which queued up a bunch of C characters if it wasn't that then it was the incorrect detection of keys often thinking I was swiping or typing something else when I wasn't even after trying different keyboards the problem persisted even on the eink panel via Yota mirror given the hardware of this device it should be more than capable so I don't particularly understand why this was happening it's displeasing as it impacts the very nature of using a smartphone hopefully this can be addressed in an update contrastingly enough everything else works just as you'd expect it to the system runs well and fluid with the app switching being Snappy thankfully the hardware components have a pretty vanilla build of Android to play with and for it it's pretty Speedy with no OEM skin weighing it down we have Android 4.4.3 here and Yoto have said Android 5.0 will be coming at a later date it should be exciting to see what updates we'll see in regards to the back panel the phone comes with only a minimal amount of app bloatware which is thankfully all removable the rest of the apps are taken up by yota's own Suite of app designed for the E in panel we have Yota RSS which works through Feedly this chest Checkers Sudoku 2048 and finally there's Yota reader this supports EBS text files but not PDFs which was slightly disappointing it's not all bad as you can use any app that you want through what Yota call Yota mirror this essentially passes the screen through to the rear in in panel you'll lose some detail in the conversion but this way you can bypass any limitations of the applications that Yota provide even though the apps aren't tailored for the in in display it's a good function that increases the usability of the device however if you use an app that requires a lot of refreshing you may end up using more battery life than you would with the front panel there's Yota snap which takes a screenshot and sends it straight to the back via a swipe gesture from the nav bar the implementation is good and works well which could really help you should you need some information to stay the nice thing about this is that as with anything using the ink display is that whatever you send will stay there even if the battery dies Yota calls this life after death there's Yota energy which is a battery saver mode that cleverly utilizes the eink display in a way that other phones can't it limits the CPU frequency turns of every wireless radio lowers the brightness and more Yota claim that with Yota energy on the last 15% of your battery life is equal to 8.5 hours of operation I tested this with 10% battery and it lasted me six further hours not bad going finally there's the Yota Hub which consists of Yota covers and Yota panels Yota covers add a nice sense of personalization to the phone and what is essentially a lock screen you can get to this by tapping the icon on the bottom to quickly bring the cover down this addresses the always on nature of the display in an easy to use manner which should please those that are concerned with the privacy of this device I mean it's superficial but the small ability to display whatever you want as your permanent image shows a nice difference to the current sea of devices out there Yota panels offer glanceable widgets and shortcuts to contacts and other apps that are made and rendered for the in in technology you have up to four screens with varied grid size presets to customize problem is you can only see what widgets are available once you've chosen your grid size meaning if you want to have another widget you have to go back and change the grid size it's all a bit unintuitive on the plus side having these apps makes logical and essential sense for the rear display elevating it from merely just a panel to something offering genuine cases of usability during the launch event I was told that there would be an SDK available so far we have seen an official Twitter widget which works on the Yota panel I only hope that this SDK will be pushed forward as the software is only good as the apps and the functions available for it we have a good start and whilst this technology isn't quite perfect yet this device can really carve out something for itself contrastingly I did encounter a few odd issues namely I could unlock the front screen with a swipe gesture mimicking the unlock action that you use on the rear in in panel the issue was sporadic but it kept reoccurring there's no mention of this anywhere as an intended feature so I'm inclined to believe this is a bug moving on to the rest of the phone there isn't much left to say as the phone is pretty basic the camera we have in Yota phone 2 is an 8 megapixel shooter which is lower than the 12 which was found on its predecessor I'm not sure whether this is an actual downgrade or if there's a better sensor there's a 2.1 megap front-facing camera but you may find yourself not using it much due to Yota mirror with the rear display you can use the main camera as the front-facing camera due to the ability to cast the main display to the rear panel this allows you to shoot a better picture otherwise when you're using the camera normally the rear display will display a nice smile the sound on the yotop phone 2 is poor but that's in comparison to today's standards fortunately it's not as bad as a speaker on my Nexus 5 which I've never really liked the audio is louder doesn't clip and has a touch more depth we have a 2 500 millia battery supplying the power to the otop phone 2 battery life was always going to be a point of contention given the rear in ink panel suffice to say the phone topped out at around 3 hours and 55 minutes on a video Loop playing 1080p via software decode on full brightness in general use I averaged about 8 hours of battery life I'm less inclined to use the phone though partly due to the phone offering very little but also because I'm using the ink panel more I'm checking my phone many times a day and most of that can easily be replaced by the in panel this say has no doubt saved a lot of battery life the Yota phone 2 is made with a unique screen I have to commend Yota on making it into a really nice and neat little package this is a great selling point but choosing to have components from a past generation a satisfactory camera and audio capabilities which are only a Touch Above disappointing I find it really really surprising just to see how high that price point really is Yoto are asking for £555 yes and in Europe it will be €699 for example you could buy a Nexus 5 which is essentially the same spec phone and a Kindle all for 338 sure it doesn't have the integration of dual screens but I don't think it deserves the premium they're asking for even still I'd like to see this phone out there I want to see it being used by developers as I believe there is some real potential with this concept it's on sale now in 20 countries in Europe the CIS and the Middle East later in 2015 they'll slowly be launching in other markets such as Asia the USA Canada and Latin America to be honest it's a good device but I can't help but think that this would be nothing without the eink panel the phone itself is pretty basic and doesn't offer anything new or even relatively interesting you may find yourself using the in in panel on the back and being quite happy with what the technology can offer not necessarily this particular implementation but the rest of the phone needs to be just as good if not better so that both feature sets can provide an attractive package the eink display is a nice one it works well with 16 levels of gray scale static pictures and texts look great I mean it's just awesome having a screen that is always on and uses very little battery life the software controlling this is slightly more restrictive than I initially thought small touches as being able to change the four icons on the dock would be a start the potential here is really large and I just hope this SDK is pushed forward as more apps and customizations will only help this sort of Technology it's not as intuitive as it should be the refresh rate and latency was never really going to work well when using it like a normal phone it requires a different form of usage that and the previous niggles I mentioned earlier I hope will be soled by Future software updates from Yota but hey at the end of the day it's all going to be down to just what you're looking for and if these features run well with you and you can live with some of the idiosyncrasies of the device then I think the Yota phone 2 will be a good choice it's a well-made phone when overall represents a very good idea and I'm happy with that but in its current state it's only just a good device and not something I can recommend based on that but also the very very high price point thanks for listening guys and Merry Merry Christmas I hope you enjoyed what you saw if you did give us a thumbs up and be sure to check out all the amazing content on Android authority.com and the YouTube channel and stay tuned to Android authority because we are your source for all things Android aMerry Christmas guys you may remember last month I got a chance to see the launch of the Yota phone 2 it's in brief time with the device and now I finally got my hands on it I'm excited to see just how good this device is outside of the showroom and whether that novelty this e in display still exists outside of that space so today we are going to take a look at the Yota phone 2 the design of the Yota phone 2 surprises me there are no markings adorning the front of the device which immediately gives it a more sophisticated look which is personally what I like to see on devices the glass that sits on it is flat but the surrounding frame and the shape of the phone accentuates this flatness the whole device sees curves everywhere the top bottom sides and back the device has a shallow gray tonality to it and this fits in well with what is yotaphone 2's headline feature the rear always on E in display the bezel and back blend into the matte e in display well and makes the whole presentation look natural for something that is quite unnatural if someone saw the back of the device it could easily be mistaken for the front whilst it does feel better holding it the normal way up it doesn't feel bad holding it upside down the device has a magnesium chassis with a glass fiber reinforced plastic outer surface both panels are covered in Corning Gorilla Glass 3 which should prove useful for the rear display as it will be the side most susceptible to scratches and scuffs the autophone 2 comes in at 8.95 MM at its thickest point 14 44.9 mm tall and 69.4 mm wide this all results in the device weighing at 145 G the Nexus 5 here is a good comparison as the two phones are very similar in terms of size the Nexus 5 is 8.6 mm thin and comes in at 130 G an imperceptible difference for something good to compare to regardless looking around the device we have the headphone port at the top the left hand side is void of any buttons or markings on the right hand side we have the standby button and above that we have the volume rocker which in this case doubles as the nano SIM card slot this may be a technical justification for having a screen on the back but the resulting effect is a slight mushiness to the button presses to some this may not matter but coming from ceramic keys on an exus 5 there is a tangible difference finally we have a single speaker on the bottom even though there are grills indicating two which is a shame really and we're left with the micro USB connection to finish it off there is no denying that Yota have done a good job incorporating two screens into a device that feels remarkably similar to nearly every other phone out there the display on the Yota phone 2 well two displays are both good the front panel is an adequately bright 5in full HD AMOLED display the white balance is not too cold nor too warm which is good and thusly provides a good experience but it does slightly lean towards a green tin the Nexus 5 again in comparison is slightly more red there is no color shift at extreme angles and the yotaphone 2 only shows the slightest or contrast shifts at these extreme angles it's a pleasing experience overall but I'm sure sure you're interested to hear about the eink display modern smartphones and their screens use a lot of power so the 4.5 in eink touchscreen display should make for a highly efficient one as it only uses power when refreshing the panel comes in at 960x 540 with 16 levels of gray scale which in this case is surprisingly crisp the concept of having two screens on a phone feels unnatural and will take a bit of getting used to Yoto recommend using the eink panel as much as possible to save that much more battery life but this will require a change of habit this change wouldn't be as jarring if it weren't for the refresh rate and the responsiveness of the in in display it's good but it's slow and can feel slow to register presses and for those presses to even take effect more often than not you also get that flicker the slowness doesn't bother me so much but here you're trying to use the back panel as if it was the front and that hurts the display we have certain expectations using devices in this sort of manner it's a trade-off at the end of the day and I'm sure Yota had to balance design and usability despite any usability issues with the eink display it still looks great pictures look great especially black and white images and Yoto have done well to manipulate the display to make it work with the rear eing panel a word of warning though the display won't be sufficient for those looking to do anything more than reading or using slower paced apps watching videos and playing games won't be a good experience at all the e in display works best if you're using for glanceable info and notifications you can answer calls check to see if you have any emails texts and it's surprising how good that feature is especially when such a technology is based around the ecosystem of your phone the best part of this e Inc display is that it works great outdoors long have we lived for this powering the two displays we have the Snapdragon 800 running at 2.2 GHz the phone has 2 gigs of RAM and comes standard with 32 GB of storage it's a curious choice for sure but it doesn't hurt the device as the phone runs fine most of the time when curious hit to the performance was the keyboard trying to type often resulted in some sort of lag which queued up a bunch of C characters if it wasn't that then it was the incorrect detection of keys often thinking I was swiping or typing something else when I wasn't even after trying different keyboards the problem persisted even on the eink panel via Yota mirror given the hardware of this device it should be more than capable so I don't particularly understand why this was happening it's displeasing as it impacts the very nature of using a smartphone hopefully this can be addressed in an update contrastingly enough everything else works just as you'd expect it to the system runs well and fluid with the app switching being Snappy thankfully the hardware components have a pretty vanilla build of Android to play with and for it it's pretty Speedy with no OEM skin weighing it down we have Android 4.4.3 here and Yoto have said Android 5.0 will be coming at a later date it should be exciting to see what updates we'll see in regards to the back panel the phone comes with only a minimal amount of app bloatware which is thankfully all removable the rest of the apps are taken up by yota's own Suite of app designed for the E in panel we have Yota RSS which works through Feedly this chest Checkers Sudoku 2048 and finally there's Yota reader this supports EBS text files but not PDFs which was slightly disappointing it's not all bad as you can use any app that you want through what Yota call Yota mirror this essentially passes the screen through to the rear in in panel you'll lose some detail in the conversion but this way you can bypass any limitations of the applications that Yota provide even though the apps aren't tailored for the in in display it's a good function that increases the usability of the device however if you use an app that requires a lot of refreshing you may end up using more battery life than you would with the front panel there's Yota snap which takes a screenshot and sends it straight to the back via a swipe gesture from the nav bar the implementation is good and works well which could really help you should you need some information to stay the nice thing about this is that as with anything using the ink display is that whatever you send will stay there even if the battery dies Yota calls this life after death there's Yota energy which is a battery saver mode that cleverly utilizes the eink display in a way that other phones can't it limits the CPU frequency turns of every wireless radio lowers the brightness and more Yota claim that with Yota energy on the last 15% of your battery life is equal to 8.5 hours of operation I tested this with 10% battery and it lasted me six further hours not bad going finally there's the Yota Hub which consists of Yota covers and Yota panels Yota covers add a nice sense of personalization to the phone and what is essentially a lock screen you can get to this by tapping the icon on the bottom to quickly bring the cover down this addresses the always on nature of the display in an easy to use manner which should please those that are concerned with the privacy of this device I mean it's superficial but the small ability to display whatever you want as your permanent image shows a nice difference to the current sea of devices out there Yota panels offer glanceable widgets and shortcuts to contacts and other apps that are made and rendered for the in in technology you have up to four screens with varied grid size presets to customize problem is you can only see what widgets are available once you've chosen your grid size meaning if you want to have another widget you have to go back and change the grid size it's all a bit unintuitive on the plus side having these apps makes logical and essential sense for the rear display elevating it from merely just a panel to something offering genuine cases of usability during the launch event I was told that there would be an SDK available so far we have seen an official Twitter widget which works on the Yota panel I only hope that this SDK will be pushed forward as the software is only good as the apps and the functions available for it we have a good start and whilst this technology isn't quite perfect yet this device can really carve out something for itself contrastingly I did encounter a few odd issues namely I could unlock the front screen with a swipe gesture mimicking the unlock action that you use on the rear in in panel the issue was sporadic but it kept reoccurring there's no mention of this anywhere as an intended feature so I'm inclined to believe this is a bug moving on to the rest of the phone there isn't much left to say as the phone is pretty basic the camera we have in Yota phone 2 is an 8 megapixel shooter which is lower than the 12 which was found on its predecessor I'm not sure whether this is an actual downgrade or if there's a better sensor there's a 2.1 megap front-facing camera but you may find yourself not using it much due to Yota mirror with the rear display you can use the main camera as the front-facing camera due to the ability to cast the main display to the rear panel this allows you to shoot a better picture otherwise when you're using the camera normally the rear display will display a nice smile the sound on the yotop phone 2 is poor but that's in comparison to today's standards fortunately it's not as bad as a speaker on my Nexus 5 which I've never really liked the audio is louder doesn't clip and has a touch more depth we have a 2 500 millia battery supplying the power to the otop phone 2 battery life was always going to be a point of contention given the rear in ink panel suffice to say the phone topped out at around 3 hours and 55 minutes on a video Loop playing 1080p via software decode on full brightness in general use I averaged about 8 hours of battery life I'm less inclined to use the phone though partly due to the phone offering very little but also because I'm using the ink panel more I'm checking my phone many times a day and most of that can easily be replaced by the in panel this say has no doubt saved a lot of battery life the Yota phone 2 is made with a unique screen I have to commend Yota on making it into a really nice and neat little package this is a great selling point but choosing to have components from a past generation a satisfactory camera and audio capabilities which are only a Touch Above disappointing I find it really really surprising just to see how high that price point really is Yoto are asking for £555 yes and in Europe it will be €699 for example you could buy a Nexus 5 which is essentially the same spec phone and a Kindle all for 338 sure it doesn't have the integration of dual screens but I don't think it deserves the premium they're asking for even still I'd like to see this phone out there I want to see it being used by developers as I believe there is some real potential with this concept it's on sale now in 20 countries in Europe the CIS and the Middle East later in 2015 they'll slowly be launching in other markets such as Asia the USA Canada and Latin America to be honest it's a good device but I can't help but think that this would be nothing without the eink panel the phone itself is pretty basic and doesn't offer anything new or even relatively interesting you may find yourself using the in in panel on the back and being quite happy with what the technology can offer not necessarily this particular implementation but the rest of the phone needs to be just as good if not better so that both feature sets can provide an attractive package the eink display is a nice one it works well with 16 levels of gray scale static pictures and texts look great I mean it's just awesome having a screen that is always on and uses very little battery life the software controlling this is slightly more restrictive than I initially thought small touches as being able to change the four icons on the dock would be a start the potential here is really large and I just hope this SDK is pushed forward as more apps and customizations will only help this sort of Technology it's not as intuitive as it should be the refresh rate and latency was never really going to work well when using it like a normal phone it requires a different form of usage that and the previous niggles I mentioned earlier I hope will be soled by Future software updates from Yota but hey at the end of the day it's all going to be down to just what you're looking for and if these features run well with you and you can live with some of the idiosyncrasies of the device then I think the Yota phone 2 will be a good choice it's a well-made phone when overall represents a very good idea and I'm happy with that but in its current state it's only just a good device and not something I can recommend based on that but also the very very high price point thanks for listening guys and Merry Merry Christmas I hope you enjoyed what you saw if you did give us a thumbs up and be sure to check out all the amazing content on Android authority.com and the YouTube channel and stay tuned to Android authority because we are your source for all things Android a\n"