Monday, 28 October 2013
The G Flex is the first LG smartphone to feature a 'Self Healing' elastic coating on the back cover, which has ability to recover from the daily wear-and-tear scratches and nicks that un-cased smartphones are likely to receive.
“The LG G Flex is the best representation yet of how a smartphone should be curved,” said Dr. Jong-seok Park, president and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company.
“The LG G Flex with its distinctive design, innovative hardware and consumer-centric user experience represents the most significant development in the smartphone space since smartphone became part of our regular vocabulary.”
LG's G Flex follows the launch of Samsung's Galaxy Round smartphone earlier this month, which also has a curved screen. Both Samsung and LG's curved phones are only available in the South Korean market as the companies seek to gauge consumer appetite.
LG and Samsung have already released televisions featuring the curved organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, which can bend because they are made of plastic rather than glass.
The phone runs on a 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor with Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 and 2GB of memory, extendable to 32GB. It features a 13-Megapixel rear camera and 2.1-Megapixel front camera for video calls. The battery is also curved, and has a capacity of 3,500mAh – enough power for more than a full day of use.
Like LG G2, the G Flex has buttons on the rear rather than the sides, meaning there is less chance of accidentally switching off the phone. The user can also adjust the volume with their index finger while talking, without any interruption to the conversation.
The global flexible display industry is predicted to grow rapidly in the next few years. Research firm IHS Display estimates the market will be worth $1.5 billion (£900 million) by 2016 and more than $10 billion by 2019.
It is thought that bendable displays could revolutionise the high-end smartphone market by making foldable designs possible as well as helping create an "unbreakable" screen thanks to its plastic base.
