Having pursued smartphones with secondary e-ink displays for a number of years, Yota Devices has now revealed to TrustedReviews it intends to bring the concept to the phablet market.
While no official devices have yet been announced, the company has suggested it will push out a 6-inch offering of its novel creation sometime in the near future.
“A 6-inch YotaPhone phablet will come to the market in the future but I don't have a date yet,” Vlad Martynov YotaPhone CEO told us.
YotaPhone handsets pair a traditional LCD panel on the front with an e-ink screen on the rear. This secondary display can be used to read ebooks and RSS feeds or keep map data visible on the move without draining battery power.
At present, the existing YotaPhone 2 features 5-inch AMOLED screen and a 4.7-inch e-ink offering.
Although keen to bring the company’s dual screen smartphone premise to the 6-inch space, Martynov has ruled out plans for a dedicated tablet with secondary, low-power screen.
“A tablet is not in the plan,” he said. “A tablet is a bigger size and the biggest differentiator of the YotaPhone is battery life.
“This would no longer be a factor because there is a much bigger battery inside. But the phablet makes sense.”
As well as revealing the company’s phablet-based aspirations, Martynov has suggested that future iterations of its phones could host a back-light, similar to that found on the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite.
However, the Yota Devices head has stated that such an addition will only be made if it can be achieved without negative battery effects.
“We may see a back-light in next generation YotaPhones but it's a dilemma. Why do I need a backlight when you have the front display? It costs money, adds thickness and would consume more battery. “I can't tell you the date for this.”
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While the idea for the original YotaPhone was perhaps better than its application, the second-generation model answered a lot of the device’s design niggles.
Moving to a more rounded, ergonomic design, the latest model lines up with a Snapdragon 801 processor, 8-megapixel camera and 32GB of internal storage.
