Turn the device on and you'll notice that both displays are of decent quality. Neither one will blow you away, but the LCD side has decent viewing angles and the E Ink side has acceptable contrast. Somehow, the phone's designers have managed to dissipate the heat from the Snapdragon processor so that it doesn't disturb the fussy E Ink particles -- a system, we're told, that is now patent-protected.

"Log in with a Google account and it'll take you seconds to figure out how to throw tomorrow's appointments over to the always-on display."

The phone provides a brief but effective tutorial, covering basic navigation and how to flip information over to the E Ink side. Navigation is done by means of swipes on the large blank capacitive area below each display, which takes some learning but has the advantage of providing a single paradigm for gestures so that they work in broadly similar ways regardless of which side of the phone you happen to be using.

Flipping info to the rear screen is done by means of a button on the top right corner of customized apps, a few of which come pre-loaded on the phone -- including a social feed aggregator, a notepad and a calendar. Log in with a Google account and it'll take you seconds to figure out how to throw tomorrow's appointments over to the always-on display -- something that is just as cool as it sounds. There's also meant to be a way to get Google Now cards on the back, but we haven't figured that out just yet.

At this point we need to burrow deeper into the phone and test its usability over a good few days, so we're going to hold off on further impressions pending our full review. That said, everything we've seen so far is extremely encouraging.

"It'll be a much better price in the second generation, because we've proved ourselves to suppliers and we can go with much bigger volumes." -- Vlad Martynov, Yota Devices CEO

We're also not too perturbed by the $675 price tag. When we asked Yota Device's CEO, Vlad Martynov, about the YotaPhone's value compared to something like the Nexus 5, he gave us an answer that makes a lot of sense: around 20 percent of the price is due to the extra display and all its knock-on effects (such as the need for nine antennas to avoid interference with the E Ink particles), and perhaps another 20 percent (as a rough guess) is due to the fact that Yota doesn't yet have enough clout to negotiate bargain prices for components from the likes of Qualcomm.

In other words, these costs are inevitable in this first version of the YotaPhone, and it's just a question of whether enough people will be prepared to pay that sort of money to be part of the journey from the beginning. If they aren't, Martynov says he's already preparing to offer better value in the second-gen -- but maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. Stay tuned for our full review coming soon!