After weeks of rumors, LG has finally made its curved smartphone, the LG G Flex official. The curved smartphone, which appeared in a hands-on video at the end of last week, currently doesn't have a North American release date, though LG's press release goes into great detail on the specifications and other aspects of the device.
Featuring a curved 6-inch display, LG is hailing this as a milestone in smartphone evolution and is calling the G Flex the first smartphone to follow the curve of the face. Though Samsung announced its own Galaxy Round weeks ago, this is technically true, as the round features a side-to-side curve as opposed to the top-to-bottom curve seen on the G Flex.
LG says the screen in the G Flex is the world's largest plastic OLED display developed and mass produced specifically for phones. The POLED and OLED nape are built on plastic substrates as opposed to glass, which allows for the curved shape as well as durability.
Of course, it's not just the display that is uniquely shaped. To make the G Flex possible, LG had to make a curved battery, too. The battery inside the phone was designed using LG Chem's patented Stack & Folding technology, which the company says reduces physical stress on the curved battery and improves stability and performance.
Having heard so much about this phone, we thought nothing would surprise us when LG made an official announcement. However, it seems the G Flex does have one more interesting feature that didn't crop up in any of the rumors over the last few weeks. LG describes the phone's back cover as 'self healing' in that it has the ability to 'recover' from daily wear-and-tear scratches and stay looking newer longer. This is done using an elastic coating and is something we can't wait to see for ourselves.
Under the hood, you're looking at a 2.26 GHz Snapdragon 800 (quad-core) with Adreno 330 graphics, that 6-inch HD 1280 x 720 curved P-OLED display we talked about earlier, 2 GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage, a rear-facing 13-megapixel camera with a 2.1-megapixel camera up front, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, LTE, WiFi, and a 3,500 mAh curved battery. The whole show is running on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.
The LG Flex will be available in Korea starting in November through all three major local carriers. LG promises availability in additional markets and will be announced thereafter.
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