Gadgetory

greetings tech fans I'm Equestria CNET's here at Aoife 2014 in Berlin with this the toast of the town is the Samsung Galaxy edge a smart phone with a really cool curved display but Samsung says that this thing doesn't just look good it's functional too so in this video we're going to check out all the different things you can do with that curved portion of the display so the first thing that that curved screen is used for is to display your favorite apps you can see them tile down here on the side of the screen and that's an interesting way of quickly getting to the applications that you probably use most often if you sweep around on this you'll see that this curved bit of the screen is also used for notifications a lot the idea of notifications being on this curved bit of the screen because it gives them more real estate than they would otherwise have if they were popping up on the smaller bit of the display at the top here that means that hopefully when notifications do come in you should be able to see a bit more text so it's not just favorite apps and notifications there's actually quite a lot of other stuff that's being displayed here and that's where that custom apps and widgets so for example this one shows you things that are trending on Twitter and this one gives you an idea of stocks if you're the financially savvy type one thing I am impressed with is how much Samsung is letting you customize this side panel and you do that by swiping up here you can see the little arrow and hitting the little settings cog so from this special edge screen menu you can see all the different apps that you have to scroll through and you can customize them as well so if you tap on manage panels that gives you the option to move them around select or deselect them and if you click this little pencil here you can do things like for example change which apps are going to appear in that favorite app menu an interesting bit of personalization is this express me option so if you tap this you can see you can have pictures showing up as one of the different screens you can swipe through if I go to click the little plus we can make a new one let's just use one of the default pictures here and then you can choose exactly which bit of it you want displayed so let's choose this guy's face hit save we can see his face there on the curved screen one final feature on this menu that I want to talk about is night block because I think this is really interesting what it does is it turns the side of the display into a clock so you can leave it on your bedside table and even when the phone is locked you'll be able to see the time so to make it work you set the duration like this you can choose exactly when you want it to be active then when the phone is locked you can see that on that curved bit you can see the time and the date useful if you wake up in the middle of the night and don't want to unlock your phone to check the time so if you swipe down on the curve bit you get this which is a shortcut to a list of useful tools and some of them are really really clever so if I tap this one for example it turns that curve bit into a ruler so you can use the phone to measure things you've also got things like a flashlight one final thing that's quite nice is that side bar plays nice with the other apps on the phone so for example if I open the camera you can see that the side bar then changes to feature all the different camera controls and that's something that will also work in other apps so lots of stuff to do then and hopefully once developers get involved they'll be able to dream up some interesting new applications for the curved screen as well is there anything you can think of that this curved display might be good for let me know and check out cnet.com slash so much much more