What is “Russian development”?

Ever since the announcement of the first YotaPhone, we are often asked the same question: “Why do you call it Russian development, because it is made and assembled at Chinese factories, and the operating system is American?”. Therefore, we decided to present our position and vision in our blog.

Developed by vs Made

About 30 years ago the world was completely different. All sorts of products are usually invented, developed and produced in one country. And because the inscription "Made in ..." was of great importance, because it could say a lot about the possible quality and properties of the product. Although already then the process of transferring production to Asia was gaining momentum.

The world today is so arranged that the majority of goods are manufactured in China, regardless of the factories or the authorship of the design. This country still remains the main world workshop. As a result, there was a kind of division of labor: the generation of ideas, the development of concepts and solutions, the development and design in the vast majority of cases are carried out in any countries, but not in China itself.
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Conservatives are of the opinion that if a product is physically manufactured in a particular country, then its belonging is appropriate. Previously, this had at least some kind of rationale, since the entire production cycle (or the main part) was located in a single country. But today it is almost impossible to create a competitive high-tech mass product by the forces of a single national economy. This requires international cooperation. That is why now the concepts of “development”, “assembly” and “production” are so important. How to evaluate the car, which was developed by engineers in Germany, spare parts for it are made in several countries in Europe and Asia, and assembled in Russia or Mexico? What country to take for the inscription “Made in ...”?

Following the logic of conservatives, Apple, Nokia and Blackberry smartphones should be called Chinese, not American, Finnish and Canadian, because they are assembled in China and almost entirely consist of components produced in this country. But still it does not occur to you to call the products of the listed companies "Chinese smartphones." And the reason is obvious here - the leading role belongs to the development teams, and not to the executing plants. This is the same as the inventor of the device called the worker behind the machine at the factory, although the author is a development engineer, on whose project the worker makes the necessary parts.

The modern market is very saturated, and high-tech products are judged by external attractiveness, performance, and, above all, what benefits it brings with it, as it expands the capabilities of customers. And in such conditions, the reduction of development time and predictability of its occurrence become critically important. After all, industrial design, like the technologies used in devices, very quickly become obsolete. As a result, without the organization of full-fledged global cooperation, it becomes almost impossible to create truly competitive gadgets.

As a rule, the main development center is located in one country, additional branches are located in a number of other countries, and production is located in China. This is the most common scheme in which it is possible to create high-quality and interesting products at a competitive price. And according to this scheme, most other manufacturers work.

By the way, in the total cost of a smartphone, the share of expenses for the assembly process is only 5%. The conservatives still have one more argument - and what about the fact that China produces all the components from which the YotaPhone is made? This is absolutely not true. For example, still the only among curved smartphones Gorilla Glass from Corning is made in the USA. The Qualcomm processor is made in Taiwan, as well as the second display on electronic ink from the company E-ink.



YotaPhone 2 consists of 761 parts, of which 607 are mounted on the boards, the rest falls on the mechanical components and preassembled nodes. By nodes are meant both the YotaPhone 2 display, the camera, the speaker, the vibration motor, etc. If all of them are disassembled into components, then the total number of components from which the YotaPhone is made reaches approximately 1040 pieces. And out of this amount in China, only about 200 are produced. If you add Taiwan, you get 500-600, with the majority of them being mechanical components.

Assembly and production, of course, are important, but they do not play a decisive role in the creation of a modern high-tech device. In full accordance with the above-mentioned structure of international cooperation, the main development center of Yota Devices is located in Russia. Like all manufacturers of A-brands, Yota Devices has a number of additional branches in different countries of the world, but all the basic intellectual work — design and development of the design, software creation — takes place in the Russian office. It was here that the concept of a permanently included second display on electronic ink was born, which is protected by a corresponding patent. Russian specialists have developed a unique for the market internal architecture and hardware of the smartphone with two screens. In total, we have received over 40 patents in the process of creating the YotaPhone, and about 130 more applications are under consideration.

Creation and management of international cooperation

A modern smartphone consists of many complex components that affect the reliability and performance of the device. To create a high-quality device requires the cooperation of organizations from different countries. Workflows between them should proceed without any difficulty, so that you can focus on creating the product as a whole, rather than any individual nodes, resolving conflicts and misunderstandings.

Each country has its own engineering culture (as well as “ordinary”), and for the continuity of the development process, a deep understanding of all the complexities and peculiarities characteristic of the areas of responsibility of each link in cooperation is necessary. How to overcome the emerging difficulties in the course of joint development in a very complex and continuous interaction of different companies? Constant monitoring of the activities of all participants is necessary in order to be able to see the full picture of the development process, and not some individual fragments. These difficult duties are performed by Russian specialists who constantly monitor all stages of device development, from concept to product distribution in more than 20 countries of the world.

Technical difficulties and challenges

From the very beginning, when creating our smartphone, we were guided by the Always On philosophy, which we wrote about a while ago. Its essence lies in the fact that almost all modern gadgets can not be called constantly included. Yes, technically they are not turned off, but in order to access their functions, it is usually necessary to take the device in hand, turn on the screen (!), Unlock, find the application you need and start it. All these operations are not needed when using the second display on electronic ink, which constantly displays only the information that the user needs. And you don’t even need to take a smartphone in hand, just look at it.



Many people think that introducing a second display into a smartphone, while maintaining its thickness at the proper level, is trivial. But this is absolutely not the case. The specified thickness of the device provided for stringent requirements for many components, their thickness should be as minimal as possible.

The YotaPhone 2 uses Samsung's AMOLED display, which has developed a display module of the required thickness, almost the thinnest on the market. This is a technology called OCTA (Oncell Capacitive Touch AMOLED), when the sensor film is integrated into the top layer of glass covering the matrix. In addition, in order to reduce the thickness, we used a display module without a rigid frame, which, for other manufacturers, serves as the device chassis. Therefore, we had to find other ways to ensure the rigidity of the structure. All these measures allowed us to make our AMOLED-display about 0.5 mm thinner than the traditional LCD-displays most commonly used in smartphones.

In addition, we reconfigured the touch controller (fifth generation, one of the best on the market, TMA568) to provide even greater sensitivity and accuracy in touch positioning.



It is also in Russia that all kinds of software for YotaPhone was developed, which allows to implement many scenarios for using the second display. We created special image processing algorithms for black and white displays, implemented the unlock gesture recognition for both screens at the touch controller level.

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Given all the above, we have never had any doubts as to which country the origin of the YotaPhone should be attributed to. We rightly call it a Russian smartphone. And not because we want it so, but because it fully corresponds to the world practice of the largest manufacturers.

We are also pleased to announce that the pre-order for the YotaPhone 2 is already available. This last week before launching is scheduled just by the minute, and the whole past year was difficult for us and filled with worries about creating the YotaPhone 2. We have invested all of this smartphone soul. His official presentation will take place on December 2 of this year.

We will keep you posted.