YotaPhone 2 with E Ink back launching in the US via Indiegogo, price drops in UK with new white color option

The dual-display YotaPhone 2 was one of the surprise showstoppers during this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. We got a hands on with the phone and loved not only its sleek minimal stylings, but its unique E Ink back. Sure, the back display was a little more clumsy in real-world use than we had anticipated, but overall we felt like it was a fresh idea and something more interesting than the higher core count most Android devices are boasting nowadays.

Today, the folks at Yota Devices are announcing a price drop for the device in the UK — now only £440 — and the introduction of an all new white color option with inverted E Ink back to match. What’s more is the YotaPhone 2 is just about ready for its US launch, well, only if it can raise enough funding through an Indiegogo campaign kicking off this July. We still don’t know how much they’ll be looking for, or once funded, how much longer it can take before the device is finally available to US buyers with support for our unique carrier bands.

It’s clear Yota Devices needs to act fast. This year we’ve seen some near perfect Android devices and when pitted against the YotaPhone 2 — with its aging hardware specs — the Russian smartphone could find itself left behind in the dust.

[YotaPhone 2 (white) | via The Verge]

You can now pre-order the dual-display YotaPhone 2 in the US through IndieGoGo

The YotaPhone 2 officially went on sale in the United States today through a good ol’ grassroots IndieGoGo campaign. This is a pre-sale, so the device won’t be shipping until August 2015 if you decide to get one.

The YotaPhone 2 is the second generation of this unique dual-display device. On one side is your traditional smartphone display for gaming, messaging, web browsing, watching videos and the like. Flip it around and you’ll see an e-paper display that’ll let you read books, check basic social networks and news apps, and more without excessive battery drain.

They claim up to 5 days of battery life if you’re just reading, and even a whopping two days for “basic smartphone functions” (meaning don’t expect to play a game for 2 days nonstop without the battery draining on you). The other benefit of using an e-paper display is that it’s an always-on element that’s ready to give you a glance at weather, incoming messages and more without having to fire up the more resource-heavy main display.

Beyond that, it’s a typical high-end smartphone. The 5-inch AMOLED display dishes out 1920 x 1080 resolution for 442 ppi, while the 4.7-inch  e-paper display comes in at 960 x 540 for 235 ppi, both of which are more than adequate for their respective purposes. You’ll also get a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 chipset, 2,500mAh battery with wireless charging, WiFi ac, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, GPS, 4G LTE and more. You can find out more details in our YotaPhone 2 hands-on from CES earlier this year.

So, price tag time: the normal starting price for the YotaPhone 2 will be 0, though getting in on some of the early orders can net you a decent discount. Unfortunately the 0 early bird option has already run out of stock. YotaPhone is running a special 48 hour price of 5, but that obviously won’t last. The more plentiful 0 option should be freely available for the life of the campaign. All options come with your choice of white or black, and a free bumper case worth . You can also snap up a portable wireless charging pad and a 4,000mAh power bank bundle for more.

Be sure to check out all of the details right here, and consider ordering one if this quirky smartphone piques your interest.

The Saygus V2 gets another massive delay to Fall 2015 (and a sketchy IndieGoGo campaign, to boot)

The Saygus V2 is a very cool phone that’s very real, but it’s also very late. And that is starting to get very annoying. The company has announced yet another delay, with this particular instance pushing the phone’s arrival back to Fall 2015.

Reasons for the delay were credited to unforeseen hiccups in manufacturing, which is not all that uncommon for companies without much experience. It’s not like we’ve never suffered a delay before, so we suppose we’ll just have to cope the best way we know how.

What we’re more concerned about, however, is that the company has thrown up a new IndieGoGo campaign for the thing with a lofty million goal. It’s being used as an avenue for folks to learn about the phone and place orders for it that are lower priority than those who were able to pre-register for the device earlier in the year.

That campaign’s million goal was over 80% fulfilled the second it went live, with funds being pledged at least two days before the campaign even kicked off. A vast majority of those pledges came in at 9 a pop, to boot. It’s possible IndieGoGo allowed Saygus to backload the campaign with the funds they secured from the pre-registration users in order to make their current campaign look more legit. But in doing so, it actually doesn’t.

Whatever the case may be, the Saygus V2 is so far off at this point that it will be silly to continue calling it the world’s most advanced smartphone by the time it’s out. Half the specs touted (seeSaygus V2 specs) are either matched or bested in other OEMs’ 2015 flagships, and Saygus’s plans to add a last minute USB Type-C port to the phone don’t do much to persuade us not to go with something that’s already on store shelves. Want to know more about this phone? We got our hands on it back at CES so be sure to check that out and decide if it’s worth jumping through hoops for.