yotaphone-update-leadWe briefly mentioned the Yotaphone once—a Russian smartphone with an LCD display on the front and an e-ink display on the back. Apparently it’s not going to be available outside of Russia for a while, and not many e-reading applications have been made to take advantage of that e-ink secondary screen.

However, Engadget today reports that the phone has been made to support the popular open-source EPUB reader app FBReader. It will even support PDF files with the next version of FBReader. Meanwhile, Yota has been “discussing potential collaboration” with Amazon. It’s easy to imagine that Amazon, having built its e-book market dominance on e-ink readers, might be interested in a cell phone with an e-ink display, especially if it’s going to be trying to break into the smartphone market itself soon.

Of course, “discussing potential collaboration” really doesn’t mean much. I could email Amazon offering to take over for Jeff Bezos, then say I was “discussing stepping in as Amazon’s CEO.’’ Just because I said it doesn’t mean it’s likely. Still, it should be interesting to see if anything comes of this.

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