Samsung has just launched its new Galaxy Round in Korea. It’s a smartphone with a curved screen, and not just a tiny, almost invisible curve either – this thing is positively banana-shaped when viewed from the top.
According to Samsung’s official global blog, Samsung Tomorrow, the Round’s curved screen allows for a whole other level of interaction: the Roll Effect allows people to find out the date, the time, whether there are missed calls and battery status when the home screen is off, and a new Gravity Effect that causes things to happen when the phone is tilted.
One of those things is apparently the ability to change track when the phone is lying on a flat surface: if the music player is playing when the screen is off, pressing the right or left edge of the phone changes songs.
On the hardware side, the Round has some pretty decent specs which closely mirror those of the Note 3: it’s very thin at just 7.9mm thick, it weighs just 154g, has a 13MP camera and it runs Android 4.3. Its 2.3GHz quad-core processor powers everything, and it has 3GB of RAM. There is no official word on whether it uses LTE for connectivity, but this photo seems to suggest that will be the case, at least in certain countries:
To Samsung’s credit, this is the world’s first curved smartphone; it just remains to be seen how consumers take to the tech, and how useful it proves over time.
There is no international launch date for the phone yet; the only country that has it right now is Korea, and it’s only available in a single colour: “Luxury Brown”. The purported retail price according to The Verge is “about $1013”, potentially making this a R10,000+ phone when it comes to South Africa.
What do you think of the curved look and new functions? Are you convinced, or would you rather spend that R10k on another phone and not get the benefit of the curve? Let us know in the comments.
Image Credit: Samsungtomorrow.com
