The star n9500 Phone as it currently exists doesn’t support the necessary cellular bands to work in the US on anything but 2G GSM

The jiayu g4 Phone is priced like a premium handset too — it’s going for 500 euros, or almost $700. For that price, other Android devices are shipping with quad-core ARM chips based on faster processing cores and 1080p screens. Even factoring in the reported 15% increased cost for the e-ink screen technology, this is still a pricey device for the specs. The battery might seem a little small too, but that’s kind of the idea. You should not need as much juice with the YotaPhone.

Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, said she expected small sales volumes for now but did not rule out that the technology would be picked up by other handset makers.

Increasing the market share for Android smartphones has always been important to Google (GOOG) — and that’s exactly why the new Google Nexus 5 is so important. Having as many people as possible using Google products to search while on-the-go is critical to maintaining the ad revenue GOOG stock depends on. And there’s no better way to do that than ensuring everyone uses Android smartphones.

The debate which one is better – iPhone or an Android phone – has been raging for years, and will probably never be settled.Xiaomi’s MIUI community is already 20+ million strong, they recently became profitable, boasted $90 million of sales in a single day and,  during the latest financing round, were valued at $11 billion. That’s for a start-up that is barely 3 years old, and operates almost exclusively in China. Not that they don’t have some ambitious plans to break out abroad. Xiaomi raised a lot of eyebrows few months ago, when it managed to nab Google’s Hugo Barra to lead its international expansion efforts.

There’s a rapid blurring of  lines between software, online services and hardware. Apple has been doing all three ever since it launched iTunes Store  back in  2003. Google now owns Motorola, designs and markets Nexus devices. In addition to XBox and Surface tablets, Microsoft will soon own Nokia’s mobile business. Amazon gets more and more aggressive with its Kindle tablet line, and will sooner or later come out with Star S10  smartphone. And then there is Samsung, who, after becoming the biggest consumer hardware company in the world, now has something like 30 thousand people working on its own software and services.

nexus-5-review-googAt the same time, GOOG has struggled with manufacturers who layer their own user interface and apps overtop of Android — a practice that contributes to Android fragmentation and diverts users from Google services such as Google Play. Samsung (SSNLF) is a perfect example, with its TouchWiz UI.

"Yota certainly has a new approach to smartphones and they not only are trying to look different but to solve an issue many consumers have when it comes to managing battery life and constant notifications," said Milanesi.

Yota plans to sell the device in Europe and the Middle East after the Russian debut, but anything beyond that is unclear. The star n9500 Phone as it currently exists doesn’t support the necessary cellular bands to work in the US on anything but 2G GSM. Maybe it’s a gimmick, and maybe it’s a revolution — most of us will have to watch from afar to find out.