The Galaxy Round's curved display does offer a few benefits, but they're mostly just related to passive usage, i.e. looking at and viewing content on the screen. However, the first “flexible” display-toting smartphone Samsung showed us way back in January this year did have practical use, such as showing the time and date on the curved side pane of the display, and now a patent application shows the different ways in which a screen bent on the side could be useful for the consumer.
These include sliding to lock/unlock, battery and charge indicators, arranging and navigating through the gallery, an e-book or other document, showing the content of the clipboard, size of an attachment of an email, and more. Those are a lot of use cases that could make operating the smartphone and viewing information on it much more convenient than it is currently, and prove a lot more useful than the curved display on the Galaxy Round.
When can we expect to see a smartphone that uses a wraparound flexible display? Well, according to Bloomberg, the first such handset will appear sometime next year, though there's no telling exactly when that will happen, so we could be waiting till the end of 2014. But if Samsung is able to pull off even half of what the patent application describes, the wait would be worth it, and so much more meaningful than the wait that led us to the Galaxy Round.
What do you think?
