Headline Dec 08, 2015/ "' A RUSSIAN : SMART-SMARTPHONE "'

"' A RUSSIAN : 

SMART-SMARTPHONE "'

THE PHONE'S CREATOR, Vladislav Martynov, 45,has been working abroad for a decade, including a stint-

As a global troubleshooter for Microsoft, when a friend lured him back to Moscow in 2008 with the idea of building a better smartphone.

While inspired by gifted Russian software developers, Mr. Martynov subscribed to the main tenet of globalization:

That few products emerge from one country alone.

"Today, there is no nationality when you create a globally competitive product in the high-tech sector," he said.  The YotaPhone  project's roughly 100 employees include software engineers in Russia-

Finnish hardware designers and multinational engineers who established the production line in Singapore.

His main marketing focus this year is China, along with Latin America.  {Carrier control over the American cellphone market makes it among the toughest to enter, he said}.

The  YotaPhone  prototype introduced in 2012  !Wowed!   international technology conferences with its novel two-screen design, with one face acting like a standard smartphone and the other like an e-reader.

The second screen supports various functions without draining the battery, such as keeping a boarding pass handy or tracking every ripple in the dollar-ruble exchange rate   -a local fixation.

In late April, Mr. Martynov presided over a packed news conference to introduce a white version of the  YotaPhone 2, hoping through that simple stroke to create the kind of cachet   -and sales-  that so far proved elusive, even in Russia.

The loudest burst of sustained applause greeted Mr. Martnov's introduction of an inaugural line of colorful rubber bumpers. Previously, dropping a YotaPhone often meant breaking it.

That underscored a critical problem hindering a range of new Russian products : Developers tend to work in isolation. 

Mr. Martnov appealed for developers to create applications for the second screen. There are now roughly 40, he said,  a drop in the ocean compared with the iPhones favoured by the Russian elite.

"You have to create an entire ecosystem for all the simple stuff," said Alexander Galitsky, 60. a computer scientist who went from developing Soviet spy satellites to pioneering Russia's nascent venture capital industry.

Many experts trace the problems with innovation to the Soviet Union. The attitude that change starts with an order from the top has not quite gone away.

In addition, though much of Russian manufacturing died after the Soviet collapse, the government does not subscribe to globalization.

When Mr. Medvedev, now the prime minister, was handed an early YotaPhone, he asked when production would start in Russia.

"If we fail to become part of the global technology chain, we are lost. Mr. Galitsky said.

Young technology buffs in Moscow gave the latest YotaPhone mixed reviews. They called the white version expensive at about $800, not much less than an iPhone 6, and not  cutting-edge given its older Android operating system.

They were sceptical that the dual screen was more than a gimmick.

Mr. Martynov defended the cost and the technology,  emphasizing the effort that went into creating the second screen, extending the battery life  and making the whole thing easy to use.

Perhaps the  phone's  main attraction for the young techies was that it was developed in Russia.

''Maybe it is a kind of first step for Russian devices,'' said Valerty Istishev, who runs Droider.ru, a Russian website about gadgets.

''It is good, but not the best. It cannot be the best at the beginning.''

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