The YotaPhone has been available in India for some time now. The device costs Rs. 23,499 but the sad thing is, like Jolla it came to the country a year after it was launched overseas. This means the phone has outdated specs for its price but from a design and practicality perspective this smartphone seems to have a lot of potential.
Dual Display
The key aspect of this smartphone is its dual display. There's a 4.3-inch 720p HD display on one side and a 640 x 360p E-Ink display of the same size on the other side, which does not support touch input. You can interact with the E-Ink display via control gestures on the bottom of the phone.
AnTuTu Benchmark
Even though the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 dual-core SoC in the YotaPhone is a quite capable chipset, we tried to gain a general perspective of the performance by trying out some benchmarks. In the AnTuTu Benchmark the phone scored 28,249, which is much lower than any phone in its price range.
Comparison
As you can see the YotaPhone struggles to catch up with other smartphones in its range in terms of performance and benchmark scores, which are way lower in than other smartphones in its price range. Synthetic benchmarks don't tell the whole story when it comes to performance, but it's still a good indicator.
3D Mark
As for the graphics performance we used the 3D Mark Benchmark, which again gave results that were lower than competitors in the same price range.
Build
We are quite impressed with the build quality of the phone though. It feels sturdy in the hand, even though it has screens on both sides. While the phone is thick, we like the fact that it slims down slightly as you move towards the headphone jack.
Camera
The YotaPhone features a 13MP rear camera (on the side that has the E-Ink display). The camera takes good pictures and sharpness, white balance and colour reproduction are pretty accurate. We did notice a some graininess in some images though. More on that in the full review.
(These are resized samples of the original images)
Low light camera sample
In low light or indoors, the camera tends to give the pictures a bluish tint, which is a little disappointing.
(These are resized samples of the original images)