Samsung has taken the wrapper off its rumored smartphone with a curved OLED display. The Galaxy Round, which will launch on SK Telecom in South Korea, has a 5.7-inch 1080p screen the same size as seen on the company’s Galaxy Note 3, but there’s a difference — it curves on the vertical axis in a similar fashion to some of Samsung’s OLED TVs.
Samsung’s Galaxy Round is the first phone with a curved display
Check battery life by tilting your phone on a table
The potential benefit of this screen technology isn’t quite clear yet, but Samsung is touting a new feature called “Round Interaction,” which allows you to look at information such as missed calls, battery life, and the date and time when you tilt it on a flat surface with the screen off. Samsung also claims that switching between home screens will feel like one continuous transition, and has worked on new tilt- and tap-based interactions for the music and photos apps.
Aside from the unconventional screen, the Galaxy Round has an impressive spec sheet. It’s 7.9mm thick, weighs 154g, and has a 2800mAh battery. The camera is 13 megapixels, like the Galaxy S4 and Note 3, and the phone runs Android 4.3 atop 3GB of RAM and a 2.3GHz quad-core processor. It’ll be released tomorrow in “Luxury Brown” for 1.09 million won (about $1,013) with more colors coming soon; no details of an international launch have been made available.
Hyunhu Jang and Adi Robertson contributed to this report.
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