The YotaPhone 2 was first introduced at MWC in February 2014, but we had to wait until early December to find out when the device will actually go on sale to the public.
Yota today announced that the YotaPhone 2 will launch in 20 European countries before the end of 2015 at a price of 33,000 roubles, which works out to around $608 U.S. dollars or 491 Euro. The YotaPhone 2 will expand into China and other Asia-Pacific locals in early 2015, followed by launches in Canada and Latin America.
Yota also says that it will open a YotaPhone flagship store in London tomorrow, December 8, to celebrate the launch of the YotaPhone 2.
As a refresher, the highlight feature of the YotaPhone 2 is its dual-display functionality, with a 5-inch 1920x1080 AMOLED touchscreen on its face and 4.7-inch 960x540 e-paper touchscreen on its backside. The YotaPhone’s also got a pair of cameras; an 8-megapixel shooter on back and a 2.1-megapixel camera around front. Packed inside of the YotaPhone 2’s 8.95mm-thick body is a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a 2500mAh battery and wireless charging. It’ll run Android 4.4 out of the box.
The YotaPhone 2 design is much-improved over the original model, and its specs are a nice step up over the OG YotaPhone as well. It sounds like Yota is planning to launch the YotaPhone 2 is a number of locales around the globe, too, so hopefully we’ll see more of it than we did its successor. As for U.S. availability, the lack of any U.S. announcement isn’t a surprise considering the country’s carrier-centric environment, and Yota might have a tough time convincing a carrier to launch the YotaPhone stateside. If you’re a U.S. resident that really wants a YotaPhone 2, importing is always an option!