No, it’s not the Galaxy S6. Actually, it’s not even a Samsung product as we expected. Many rumors last year were pointing out at the possibility of this technology being adopted by subsequent Samsung products following the experiment that was the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Edge.
Now, to be honest, the company has announced that the S6 will come out in a curved display “Edge” variant as well, but by the time it does it might not even be that fancy anymore.
But this isn’t even an article about the Samsung Galaxy S6 so let’s turn our attention to the early bird that is the unnamed LG Display phone. This year, at CES 2015, LG seems to have moved their focus onto the curved display technology with a lot of fervor, not only coming to present a number of curved television sets and the G Flex 2, but also the LG Display phablet that sports not one, but two curved edges. So in essence, LG raised the idea behind the Galaxy Note 4 Edge and doubled the gamble.
Visually, the LG Display offspring looks like something picked up from the future, or at least some not far off away science fiction production. It adopts a different form of the curved screen technology – instead of the inwardly arched display that we can see in the LG G Flex 2, the LG phone in question basically had its left and right edges turned into strips of screen that work separately and independently from the main display.
Displaying notifications, shortcuts and other useful tools, the side, curved edges are meant to somewhat remove clutter from your main screen, allowing it to stay clear and only populated by your focus – watching movies, full-screen apps, taking photos or shooting videos, so on and so forth. The side screens also have capacitive touchscreen properties, allowing you to tap and swipe through their functionalities just as well.
Back when the Galaxy Note 4 Edge was released, a huge amount of people were excited by the concept and it became the next big attraction of the smartphone world. However, after release, upon actually owning and trying out the phone for a period of time, users have started becoming reluctant and wondering if the curved edge was worth the extra $150.
The utility of the feature ended up feeling somewhat limited by current software to match up with the advance in hardware and design power ups. Sure, it’s a neat step forwards, and being able to discreetly make use of the side screens to check your notifications or read your messages during a meeting, getting a handy ruler to use or simply being able to access your apps without having to scroll through pages and pages of your menu is definitely not something to complain about.
But the main issue right now is still the fact that the application market is a tad slower in approaching this aspect of the smartphones coming out in 2015 – except those mentioned above, there’s little to no other use for the clever side strips of screen. If, with time, developers start taking this aspect as a potential feature of future generations of phones, it will probably make the technology a more appealing option in smartphone and phablet fabrication.
Otherwise, the curved side screen concept will remain something that only the most devoted tech lovers will appreciate but not that appealing for the regular consumer. Considering this technology does tax on production costs in a considerable amount, most regular consumers will probably not opt for the curved edge devices if the functionality does not improve in some way.
Regarding the technical specifications of the dual-curved device brought by LG Display, there’s not so much that we know for sure. The concept device presented at CES 2015 is a healthy 6-inch HD display phablet.
This makes us think that operating it might actually become a tiring, difficult thing to do without a stylus. The device is absolutely huge – no one-handed usage will probably be possible, especially considering the grip on it would probably suffer due to the curved, interactive edges. The screen of the LG dual-curved device did not present itself as that impressive, being only a 720p resolution plastic OLED display. Not as clear and vibrant as you would expect from your revolutionary 2015 smartphone or phablet – and on top of that, LG has also announced the device is ready for mass production so it might be the final form too.
Considering the LG G Flex2 is already the host of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, there’s no reason for us to not expect this version to not sport the same, state of the art Qualcomm chipset. And considering that the GPU was made to support and actually function better with 4 GB of RAM, we have good enough reason to speculate that that’s the number we should be looking at for the dual-curve edged wonder.