The Galaxy Note Edge

Lots of new phones and watches are being pre-announced this week, for some reason. Here’s David Pierce at The Verge on the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge (which doesn’t even have pricing or a release date, which tells you all you need to know about how Samsung wanted to present this ahead of next week’s you-know-whats):

It’s an odd idea, turning this vertical rail into essentially an always-on secondary display. Is it best-suited as a ticker? A notification center? A quick-launch taskbar? Samsung doesn’t seem entirely sure, and in a few minutes of using the Galaxy Note Edge it was clear that while well-implemented and useful the whole idea isn’t necessarily fully formed.

Still, by releasing the Note Edge broadly — it’s coming to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint — and giving both users and developers a chance to figure out what they want, Samsung could find itself with a truly unique smartphone feature that no other manufacturer can copy.

Yes, let the people spending hundreds of dollars for these things figure out what the (oddly right-handed-biased) curved side screen is useful for.

(Somewhere inside Xiaomi, there are people laughing heartily at that “feature that no other manufacturer can copy” line.)

★ Wednesday, 3 September 2014