The man with a red rotary phone that gives him a direct line to Samsung’s factories in South Korea has just tweeted a photo of the company’s first smartphone with a flexible AMOLED display. While @evleaks doesn’t know the final name of the device, it’s clear that it’s a variant of the Note 3. Now before you go ahead and make fun of the photo, let me present you with a thought borrowed from LG. When LG introduced the G2, they emphasized, repeatedly, that the width of a phone dictates how comfortably you can hold it in one hand.
If this Note 3 variant turns out to be legit, then the gentle curvatures on the sides of the device will, by pure math, make the phone narrower since the 5.7 inch diagonal display isn’t flat. In other words, this Note 3 will be far easier to hold than previous Note devices, though the degree as to how much easier is hard to determine without an actual hands-on.
Speaking about hands-on, I highly doubt that anyone outside of South Korea will ever touch this thing. Flexible AMOLED panels are going to stay niche for quite a long time, which means shipments will be limited. Also, do you really want to be a guinea pig for this technology? For all we know, these displays will lose half their brightness after just one year.
Expect more when the official announcement happens later this month.
Update: One more photo!