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YotaPhone 3 is coming to China in September with a new look

YotaPhone 3 is coming to China in September with a new look

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With (mostly) better specs all around

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The double-sided YotaPhone is back. Baoli Yota has officially announced the YotaPhone 3, an Android handset with a 5.5-inch 1080p Samsung Super AMOLED display, and — of course — 5.2-inch E-ink display on the back of the phone. The phone goes on sale for 4,000 RMB (about $600) in mid-September at Chinese retailer JD.com.

Despite the dual screens, the YotaPhone 3 has a premium iPhone-ish look to it. It also packs in a 3,300 mAh battery, a USB-C port, a 13-megapixel rear camera (with a 12-megapixel front camera), dual SIM slots, and a fingerprint scanner in the home button on the front of the phone — basically everything that Engadget reported back in June, including an outdated, midrange Snapdragon 625.

The YotaPhone 3 has more memory and storage, than its predecessor, too. The base model got bumped up to 4GB of RAM and 64GB, and a 128GB variant will be available. The phone will ship with Android Nougat, though that will be skinned with Yota’s own software.

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Aside from the processor, some of those specs sound reassuring — especially considering they seem to address some of the bigger shortcomings of the YotaPhone 2 — but they’re still not the reason you buy this phone. You buy this phone because it has a display on each side. You, perhaps, buy this phone because you want an e-reader and don’t want to carry around two devices. But most of all, you buy this phone because you want to believe that there’s room for something different from a black glass and metal slab with a fingerprint sensor on the back.

Of course, the “you” in this scenario is a bit fuzzy at the moment. The company tells us that it will be sold in “Russia and other markets” after the September release in China, it’s just not clear what those “other markets” will be. When Yota Devices tried to bring the YotaPhone 2 to the United States, the phone never made it because of manufacturing problems — despite raising more than five times its crowdfunding goal.