Samsung introduced the first smartphone to come with a curved display. The Samsung Galaxy Round isn't traveling too far away as it will make its debut and launch in Korea on Thursday. Priced at 1.09 million won ($1013 USD), the device will originally be offered in Luxury Brown but other colors will be available later.

The Samsung Galaxy Round is basically a Galaxy Note 3 with a curved screen, which makes it less wide and thus probably easier to hold with one hand. Other than that, there are no benefits to the screen used, and the fact that it's ‘flexible'. Which is why Samsung is understandably only going to release the Round in South Korea. There are currently no plans for sales elsewhere, and you shouldn't expect that to change since the company still has a limited production capacity for flexible screens.

The 5.7 inch Super AMOLED screen offers resolution of 1080 x 1920, and is powered by a quad-core 2.3GHz processor with 3GB of RAM on board. A 2800mAh battery powers the unit which has Android 4.3 pre-installed. The handset is equipped with a 13MP rear-facing camera. While the phone has just been introduced, we could soon see major competition. Fellow Korean manufacturer LG said on Monday that its display unit is ready to release a flexible OLED panel.

The Samsung Galaxy Round will be available tomorrow in brown only, and more colors should follow at a later date. It will be priced at around $950-$1000, which is going to force it to stay niche for a long time.

Samsung Galaxy Round is the first flexible display smartphone in the world that entered the market this year, and Samsung has released a new TV ad to highlight its main feature, the curved screen.

As you can see from this new TV ad, the Samsung Galaxy Round is coming to SK Telecom in South Korea, and it may be quite a while until we see flexible display smartphones in other markets.

Samsung Galaxy Round Specs:

• 5.7-inch 1080p OLED display. Oh yeah, it's also curved.
• Android Jelly Bean 4.3
• 7.9mm thick, 154g
• 13MP camera
• 2,800mAh battery
• 2.3GHz Exynos quad-core processor
• 3GB RAM
• Specialized Touchwiz features

RoundR serves a simple purpose; To round the corners of your screen. RoundR is licensed under Apache 2.0.

RoundR takes advantage of the fact that regardless of the device's color, the screen is surrounded with a pitch black border, the corners of which are rarely ever touched. RoundR places four small overlays at the corners of the display, to simulate a rounded screen.

RoundR uses Mark Wei's Brilliant StandOut library to display the overlays. The source code for Mark's library (tweaked) & RoundR can Be found here on GitHub.

Source: Google Play Store