Russia's First Smartphone Goes on Sale The YotaPhone features an LCD screen on one side and an electronic paper display on the other side designed to mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper. MOSCOW - Russia's first smartphone - a quirky, dual-screen device with a traditional LCD-color display on one side and an electronic-paper display similar to the Amazon Kindle on the other - began selling in Russia and several other European countries on Wednesday. The Yotaphone, developed by a Russian tech start-up, Yota Devices, will be sold for about $675 in Europe and for $600 in Russia, slightly cheaper than top competitors like the Apple iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S4. The Russian phone, which uses an Android operating system, is an attempt by a European company to jump into the handset market, largely dominated by American and Asian manufacturers. Nokia, the largest cellphone maker in Europe, is in the final stages of selling that business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion. Jolla, a smaller Finnish start-up founded by former Nokia engineers, has only recently started selling its own handset aimed at a global audience. At a kick-off event at the popular Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in downtown Moscow, the chief executive of Yota Devices, Vladislav Martynov, said the introduction of dual screens was "a revolution in telephone architecture" and would conserve battery life. Mr. Martynov said that the electronic-ink display on the back of the Yotaphone would show information, including feeds from Facebook and Twitter, even when the phone is not in use. "Before Yotaphone, this space was useless," he said. While Russian Internet companies like the Yandex search engine are popular in Russia and software companies like Kaspersky Lab, an antivirus developer, have found international success, there have been no breakout leaders among Russian consumer technology producers, a sector where the country has traditionally lagged. Interest in smartphones is growing in Russia, as it is in other developing countries, with two of every five phones sold in the second quarter being a smartphone, the research firm IDC said in a report last month. The idea of the Russian-made smartphone began to take shape in 2010 when Sergei Chemezov, the head of Rostekhnologii, a government company that produces and exports high-tech equipment, showed Dmitri A. Medvedev, who was president at the time and is now prime minister, an early mock-up of the dual-screen phone. Mr. Medvedev, a fan of Apple products who has positioned himself as a champion of innovation in Russia's tech sector, said then that the dual-screen phone could be a key project for the industry. Yota, which is best known for developing 4G networks and providing wireless communication services in Russia, took on the project when its parent company was partly owned by Rostekhnologii. Yota Devices, which was spun off from Yota in 2011, is privately owned. The Yotaphone made a strong showing in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where it won a CNET Best of CES Award for "Hottest Mobile Device." Mr. Martynov declined to say how many units were in production but said more than 10,000 orders for the phone had been placed in advance of the launching. It is being produced in Singapore, Taiwan and China, but Mr. Martynov hinted that elements of production may take place in Russia in the future. Besides Russia, the device is being sold in Austria, France, Germany and Spain. It will go on sale in Britain in January. There are no plans to sell it in the United States. The phone has a 4.3-inch 1280 HD display, slightly larger than the iPhone 5 but smaller than the top-selling Galaxy S4, which has a 5-inch screen. "I'm sure the people whom we call the trendsetters will absolutely love the idea," said Michael Tuch, chief executive of Svyaznoy, a mobile retailer that has a contract to sell the Yotaphone in Russia. The first device is a good way of showing something new. What we're looking for are actually the next devices, which I'm sure Yota has in their pockets. Mark Scott contributed reporting from London.