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Samsung has unveiled a new curved smartphone handset only a matter of days after rival LG announced it was working on flexible displays.
The Korean firm’s new handset, called the Galaxy Round, has similar specifications to its Note 3 device, but is differentiated by a 5.7-inch concave screen fixed to curved casing.
It’s designed to fit in the palm of a hand more comfortably. The phone is only currently available in Korea through mobile operator SK Telecom, and costs 109 million won (BD380).
Samsung has not announced if or when then the handset will be made available in other countries.
The Galaxy Round can’t bend or change shape, but it is the world’s first smartphone with a curved design.
The size of the screen makes it the same size as Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3. It is 7.9mm thick and weighs 154g.
Samsung has said that its overall design and curve offers ‘a comfortable hand grip feeling to users’.
Recently, LG Display said it had developed flexible display technology, and its research arm LG Chem announced it is nearly ready to unveil its bendy batteries.
LG’s 6-inch display will be made of bendy plastic substrates, rather than glass, and the panel can be attached to any curved device.
The design is 0.44mm-thick and has a protective film attached to the back, making it ‘bendable and unbreakable’. It has a radius of 7cm, weighs 7.2g and is vertically concave from top to bottom.
Other features of the Galaxy Round that take advantage of the curved display include what’s dubbed Roll Effect, which lets users roll the phone towards them to see the date, time, missed calls and battery life without pressing the power button or activating the home screen.
The Galaxy Round additionally has a 2800mAh battery and a 13MP camera, as seen on the Galaxy S4 and Note 3. It runs on Android 4.3 and has 3GB of RAM with a 2.3GHz quad-core processor.
Both Samsung and LG have already used curved displays on top-of-the-range OLED TVs. On TVs, the curved screen is designed to improve the viewing angle and make shows and films feel more ‘immersive’.
