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After months of waiting, years if you count the first YotaPhone, the two-faced, and we mean that kindly, smartphone is ready to enter the US market. But now, you won't be able to get the YotaPhone 2 off your favorite carrier or from a retailer. At least not yet. Russian company Yota is perhaps still testing the North American waters and will be coursing the dual display AMOLED and e-ink smartphone via an Indiegogo campaign instead. Which should probably give them a more or less accurate assessment for the YotaPhone 2's demand.

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On their website, a countdown timer ticks away. Nobody’s really sure what’s going on, but Pebble is teasing that in nearly five days’ time, we’ll have something new from them. As the little 8-bit, smiling watch humorously mocks us (not really), we’re left to wonder what’s going on. A new report suggests we’ll see new hardware from Pebble — new hardware that we were hoping to get last time around, when we ended up with a Steel version. We could also be in for a software surprise.

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Much has been made of Project Ara's modularity, but what modules exactly could be snapped into the customizable phone? Google's developer event saw several early partners give some teasers as to what blocks might come to the market, spanning everything from task-specific cameras for 3D, optical zoom, and more, through to medical testing, and even alternative displays like e-paper, all in the name of doing much more than a regular smartphone could.

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The dual-screen e-ink toting YotaPhone has been one of the more interesting smartphones to enter our radars for the past two years. Happily, it is making its way to the US this time around. But, naturally, the YotaPhone 2 has to stop by the FCC first for certification. And quite surprisingly, the smartphone's filing has more information than FCC sightings usually yield, including some photos of the innards of the device, as well as the user manual that clues us in on how the smartphone's rather ingenious features are meant to work.

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You have to give the team at Yota credit for not giving up on their dual-display smartphone dream. The original YotaPhone was a curious - but flawed - riff on the Android smartphone, a regular screen on one side and an E Ink panel on the back, let down by immature software and hardware. Now, with the YotaPhone 2, the company believes both concept and product are ready for the mass market. I’ve been trying the new smartphone out this week ahead of sales kicking off today, and it’s clear there certainly are advantages over opting for more screens, rather than just bigger ones. Read on for some first-impressions.

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Russian company Yota has finally taken off the veils from the second generation YotaPhone in two consecutive events in Moscow and London. The YotaPhone 2, one of the brighter stars in this year's CES and MWC expos, gives more class and more power to an already appealing concept. Aside from having a second screen driven entirely by e-ink technology, YotaPhone adds touch to that display, giving users practically two touch screens, switching between the two as the need arises and conserving power along the way.

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Sony's e-paper watch plan rumors sounded mysterious when they surfaced recently, but it turns out we'd actually seen the face-changing, power-sipping timepiece before, only under a different name. In fact, the distinctive timepiece - which uses e-paper not only for the watchface itself, but around the strap itself - was quietly launched on a crowdfunding site as the Fashion Entertainments FES Watch, a brand which Sony has now confirmed was set up by the skunkworks team at the company looking into the broader practical applications of screens more commonly found on e-readers like the Kindle.

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Smartwatches might be useful, at least to some, but their battery lives are nothing to write home about, given the available space you can cram a battery into. Some smartwatch makes, most notably Pebble, have opted to stay with the colorless but more power-efficient e-ink types of display. Based on an insider source, Sony might be eying something similar too, but with an intriguing twist. It won't just be the watch face that will be using e-ink, but the whole wrist band itself as well.

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The dual-sided YotaPhone, which slaps a 4.3-inch E Ink display on the back of an Android smartphone, has gone on sale, with the ability to switch content between its double screens. Revealed at CES back in January, the YotaPhone is up for order now priced at €499 ($679) in Russia, Austria, France, Spain, and Germany, targeting frequent readers who want to prolong battery life by using the more frugal monochrome epaper panel on the back cover.

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Flexible display specialist Plastic Logic has cooked up a new, weatherproof and permanently-connected display that aims to keep public transport users up-to-date while remaining vandal resistant, as the company's technology gradually makes it out into the mainstream. The ZED (Zero Energy Display), produced in partnership with signage specialist SERELEC, is expected to show up at bus stops and tram stations in Q2 2013, pairing two 10.7-inch monochrome Plastic Logic panels into a display with clear outdoor visibility and super-frugal power consumption.

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E Ink is grabbing a majority share of fellow e-paper maker SiPix Technology, the company has confirmed, and aims to snatch up 100-percent of shares in a deal worth around $50m. The agreement, which his expected to be  finalized by the end of the year, is part of E Ink's aim to corner the e-paper market, and will see SiPix tech - including that of its SiPix Imagine subsidiary - integrated into future E Ink products.

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Plastic Logic revealed a big shift in strategy last month, pushing its own flexible plastic-based epaper displays for third-party products, and its new video-capable color panels are top of the agenda. SlashGear caught up with Plastic Logic at the company's Cambridge, UK, R&D center today to see one of the very first demonstrations of the new screen, a flexible panel that can support color video playback at up to 12fps. Read on for the video demo.

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