Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm Kay PhD here and the display you're watching this on is flat it's flat your TVs are flat your computer monitor is flat your phones and your tablets are flat and that's fine that's what everyone is basically used to by now but a new interesting form factor is kind of arrived in just this year 2013 and that's curved displays but what is a curved display and why would anyone want that on their phone what is the point well taking this back to the beginning of this year in January 2013 that's where we first saw this technology in samsung's young the first Samsung yam devices featured partially curved LED displays one with an angled portion to the side and another one with an angled portion to the bottom and the goal of these devices was to use that software to only light up the curved portion of the display for notifications and glanceable information but these were prototypes so they never really saw mass production or were sold anywhere but flash forward to now October of this year and we're seeing first devices where the entire display is curved namely the Samsung Galaxy round the Alex T round has a 5.7 inch 1080p LED display has a Snapdragon 800 processor 3 gigabytes of RAM it's running Android 4.3 it's basically the same exact specs as the Galaxy Note 3 but instead of having a 3,200 milliamp hour battery it has a 28 hundred million power battery because it's curved yeah this phone's entire display is curved from side to side about that Center axis why you may ask well right now again it's another one of Samsung's little thought experiments to see how people react to this but they've actually included some interesting software enhancements that actually take advantage of this phone's unique shape it uses the accelerometer and the gyroscope to sense when the phone is tilting and when it does tilt it provides glanceable information and notifications when you rock it on a table plus there are other motion controls for the gallery and the music and other apps that I'll take advantage of you being able to rock the stone on a table basically the whole ton of crazy Samsung stuff that we'll be able to do all this awesome stuff when it knows that the phone is tilted but not everyone has their phone on a table all the time to tilt we have it in our pockets and in our hands and even up to our faces to make calls so LG thought of that and almost immediately after Samsung revealed the galaxy round some leaks got out of a curved display phone that LG is working on the LG G flex this phone is curved from top to bottom about the center axis and a bit more dramatically - it has a 700 millimeter curve radius which is about twice as much as a Samsung Galaxy Nexus curve here's a mock up to scale of what that curve looks like from top to bottom so you can see it's definitely not a shy curve but there's a good reason we haven't seen phones with curves this much until this year so there's a difference between curved glass and curved display the display sits beneath the glass and phones like the Galaxy Nexus and other curved phones like that had curved glass so the glass on top of the display was curved up a bit but the display panel underneath it was still flat and once you get the curve of the glass too much off above the display the stuff you get some distortion issues and a little bit of touch responsiveness and accuracy issues when you curve the display right up underneath the glass you start to open up a whole new world of possible shapes and curves for the slab form-factor touch screen and trust me it gets really really crazy but going back to the question why would you want it why would you want a curved display smartphone that's going to be up to you and that's up to manufacturers to convince you that you want it by value-adds and adding software and things like that and features that you can have on a curved display smart phone but you can't have on a non curved display smart phone and they'll be trying to use these things to convince you you want it and see how it goes because there are definitely disadvantages right now at this point - also having a curved display smart phone number one is obviously battery life you can curve the display as much as you want but the batteries got to go somewhere and battery cells don't curve you can only really stack them on top of each other so you'll either get a really thick phone or a really small battery and then there are other minor things like the video viewing experience which could look a little bit weird watching a full screen video on a curved display a little bit of distortion and other things like you know but typing on a table while it's rocking back and forth experience could be weird and ultimately the durability issue because you know sonck it was a good idea to put your phone in your back pocket and sit down anyway but now you could literally damage your phone by sitting down the wrong way I notice I haven't said the word flexible once curved displays and flexible displays are different things curved displays and curved smartphones are already actually being manufactured flexible smartphones are still a long way off we've seen a ton of amazing flexible displays this year too especially again at the beginning of this year at CES Samsung showed off a ton of awesome stuff with flexible displays but ultimately in a phone you can make that display as flexible and wobbly as you want but the rest of the phone is still rigid the battery is still rigid the CPU than the RAM and all the components underneath it are still rigid that's why any time you see a portable smartphone display you always see a whole bunch of components hanging off of it that would be the rest of the smartphone ultimately though this is all just experimentation at this point but you know it all started off as experimentation the Galaxy Note line and look where that is now that did quite well so that's exactly what this is and Samsung's not afraid to take chances at this point because you could have a runaway success like that so that's exactly what the galaxy round is an experiment and who knows maybe it'll take off the exact same way the Galaxy Note line did we're voting with our wallets on this one and if we the people buy it and companies will absolutely work much harder on this and start to develop and mature the technology but right now it's definitely still in its infancy and when a technology is still in its infancy it's still pretty expensive hence the galaxy round is retailing for around $1000 off contract right now in Korea but again when this develops and when this starts getting much more mature we're going to see some pretty awesome things in the next generation of smartphones so what do you think curved display smartphones galaxy round LG G flex is anything stuff interesting to you guys I think I'll wait for the galaxy round two and a couple years either way thanks for watching this video guys hope you enjoyed and if you did definitely the thumbs up below but more importantly there's a subscribe button below if you want to see more videos like this on a regular basis thank you for watching I'll talk to you guys in the next one peace