YotaPhone

YotaPhone has an LCD color screen on the front and e-ink on the back.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

It sounds like a bad "Star Wars" pun and looks like someone slapped a Kindle e-reader on the back of a smartphone, but the two-sided YotaPhone promises to be so much more.
On the front, you've got a 4.3-inch, 1,280x720-pixel HD, full-color LCD, and the back, a secondary screen uses a monochromatic e-ink technology (at 200dpi). Both are reinforced Gorilla Glass.

Most importantly, the screens are interconnected, which means that you'll be able to quickly pass information from one to the other.
Why the two screens? It's all about battery savings. E-ink conserves more resources than color HD displays, so if you're just reading a long article or a book, use the low-power e-ink side, and when you're ready to watch a TV show or swipe through a photo gallery, flip the phone around to use LCD.
It's no slouch on the features, either. It has Qualcomm's 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus (MSM8960) chip and 4G LTE. It also features a 12-megapixel camera and a front-facing camera with 720p resolution, plus 32GB of storage (not expandable) and 2GB RAM.
The YotaPhone weighs 4.9 ounces and is about 0.4 inch thick. The YotaPhone will come to Russia in Q3 of 2013, before arriving in other countries.
A couple of reservations
It all sounds great in theory -- nobody else has innovated a dual-screen setup like this -- but I have a few reservations. First, it isn't entirely clear if you can transfer any and all information from screen to screen or if there are limitations. That's something I'm certainly going to find out when I get my hands on the YotaPhone at CES.
I'm also a little dubious of dual-screen phones, which have a habit of under-delivering or failing to capture users' excitement. This little rogue's gallery of dual-screen smartphones gone wrong will jog your memory.
I'm also not sure how convenient it will be to keep flipping the phone over at intervals to use first one side and then another. For me, at least, inertia takes over when I get immersed, and I become loathe to switch up what I'm doing.
That said, it could work seamlessly. I'm still really looking forward to seeing the YotaPhone in person next week, and taking those double displays on a test ride.