YotaPhone

» see yotaphone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

YotaPhone went on sale in Russia in December 2013 and reached a handful of western European markets after that. Turkey was never on the list and no Turkish operator ever carried it, so this was a phone I read specifications for and never once saw in a hand. The premise was easy to admire from that distance. A normal Android device on the front and electronic paper on the back, the back still holding an image long after the front had gone dark.

Yota Devices was spun out of the Russian operator Yota in June 2011 to build hardware on its own. The prototype was shown in Moscow in December 2012 and the finished thing turned up at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2013, where it collected device-of-the-show prizes. Later that year it took a Gold Lion at Cannes in the innovation category. Building the first model cost fifty million dollars.

It sold thirty thousand units. The second generation shipped in December 2014 with a touch-sensitive rear panel and a full HD front, priced around thirty three thousand rubles and pushed into roughly twenty European countries at once. Across both models the company moved about seventy five thousand phones. In November 2014 Vladimir Putin handed a YotaPhone 2 to Xi Jinping in front of cameras, which is more attention than most handsets ever get and made no difference to any of it.

Ownership moved east the whole time. Rostec, the Russian state industrial corporation, held a quarter of it. A Hong Kong investor called REX Global, later renamed China Baoli, took thirty percent in 2015 along with the exclusive right to the YotaPhone trademark in mainland China for seven years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the second screen ~

Electronic paper holds an image without drawing power. That is the entire argument, and on a phone it means the back of the device can sit there showing a boarding pass or a map for days, through a battery that has nothing left in it. On the first model the rear screen was not touch-sensitive and you drove it from the front. On the second it was, so the back became a second usable surface rather than a display case.

Nobody else shipped this. Plenty of two-screen phones have been made since and all of them run color panels that drain the battery. The e-ink side could not be copied cheaply because it needed a supplier willing to make small runs of an unusual panel, and that supplier turned out to be the problem rather than the moat.

~ the third phone ~

Yota 3 was sold in China from late October 2017, built with China Baoli behind it and aimed at a market where the brand had a licensing deal instead of a history. Between October 2017 and July 2018 it sold slightly more than seventeen thousand units, on revenue of about forty one million Hong Kong dollars, and Baoli reported a fifteen million dollar loss on the line.

Vladislav Martynov, who founded the company and ran it, sold his own ten percent to China Baoli in February 2018. At the end of that year Rostec sold its 25.1 percent stake to a Chinese group called Trinity World Management for three billion rubles, taking the Baoli and Trinity consortium past sixty five percent. The head office moved from Moscow to China. The Russian phone was, by then, Russian in name and in nothing else.

~ the supplier ~

Hi-P, a Singapore contract manufacturer, made the e-ink assemblies. Yota had committed to minimum order volumes it never took delivery of, which is a mundane thing to do when your phone is selling in the tens of thousands against a plan written for millions. Hi-P sued for a hundred and twenty six million US dollars.

The Supreme Court of the Cayman Islands, where the holding company sat, declared Yota bankrupt in April 2019. There was no announcement from the company and no farewell page. The trade press picked it up over the following few days from the court filing.

Seventy five thousand phones is not a failure of manufacturing or of design. It is a failure to be in enough countries at once, and Yota was in almost none of them for almost all of its life.

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