We spend some time with a stylish and surprisingly non-ridiculous curved-screen smartphone
The Galaxy Round’s designers have given it a slightly curved screen that clearly set off the ‘Designed by clowns’ klaxon on Twitter. It was abused and ridiculed in a manner akin to red-tops going after a ‘British Bake Off’ contestant who said something sensible and nuanced about gender politics in The Guardian.
Hyperbole aside, we wanted to know what advantages a curved screen can bring to a smartphone. Not a lot, it turns out. Nevertheless, Samsung’s Galaxy Round may be the company’s best-looking handset yet.
When Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Round it claimed it to be the world’s first smartphone to feature a curved touchscreen. It has a top-end specification and includes software features that leverage the curved design.
Most of the world won’t see this phone any time soon. Samsung, for now, plans to release the handset only in its home market of South Korea, priced at around £600. However, the firm did make it available for hands-on use at one of its Seoul offices.
In a way, you could describe the Round as a curved version of the Galaxy Note 3. The two handsets share nearly identical features and the same design style. Both have a full-HD 5.7in screen, a fast processor, a 13Mp rear camera and even the same leather-like synthetic fibre covering the back.
Despite hardware similarities with the Note 3, the Galaxy Round feels and looks different. The phone is slightly lighter (154g vs 168g) and is easier to grip with its curved back. This is one benefit of using Samsung’s flexible displays, which the company says weigh less than traditional displays. At the same time, the phone feels sturdy and its curves are more pleasing to the eye.
Users don’t have to worry about the phone rolling off a table or even wobbling. The device’s display is not as round as its name suggests. The arch is subtle, and contours more at the edges. When placed on a table the Round remains stationary. But due to its curved backing, Samsung included a few software features that activate when a user tilts the phone on its spine.
One of these, called the ‘Roll Effect’, automatically turns on the screen and displays the time and date, when the phone tilts toward the user. A similar feature allows the user to cycle through songs played on the device. A tilt toward the right side will forward to the next track, while a tilt toward the left will restart the song.
When put into practice the two functions are easily activated, but we found it sometimes took a harder tilt to cycle through music tracks. Both features, however, can activate only if the phone is laid on a table.
A third function works when viewing the phone’s image gallery. A soft touch to the screen’s centre and a flick of the wrist will display a sidebar showing the other albums stored on the phone.
These so-called tilt functions offer nice shortcuts, but they could also easily be incorporated into any Samsung phone. Perhaps the company will do so in the future, but it’s likely that most users will look at the features as novelties, much like how the Samsung Galaxy S4 will track facial- and eye movements to help the user scroll through websites. Getting them to work on the Round can also take several tries at first.
When looking at the phone’s screen the curvature can be easy to miss. When you’re directly facing at the display the arch blends in and seems flat. It brings to mind how the electronics industry is also moving to televisions with curved screens.
These TVs can arguably offer a wider field of view over traditional flatscreens. But in the case of the Galaxy Round, it’s difficult to notice any difference, given that the phone already has a superb screen with its AMOLED display technology.
Save for the Galaxy Round’s screen, nothing else inside the phone is curved. Despite that only the phone’s aesthetics really set it apart from the Note 3, we like it – as it’s a really stylish piece of product design that subtly stands out from the crowd. And if you don’t like its dark ‘luxury brown’ colouring, a white version will be available in December (in South Korea).
Samsung hasn’t given any concrete details on the future of its curved displays for smartphones, and we can’t necessarily see this becoming widespread – but that’s kind of the point of a distinctive device such as the Galaxy Round.
