LG today announced the G Flex, an Android smartphone that has a curved display and a self-healing rear cover. The G Flex is curved across the horizontal axis, which makes it somewhat banana-shaped. LG says this curve helps the phone fit better against the owner's face, boosts the earpiece volume by 3dB, allows the phone to rest more comfortably in the hand, and is more comfortable when placed in back pockets. In order to make the curved shape possible, LG developed a curved, plastic OLED display, which measures 6 inches across the diagonal and has 720p HD resolution. According to LG, the plastic OLED display is flexible, durable, brighter, and more precise than traditional OLEDs thanks to the materials and use of Real RGB pixels. The curved screen is paired with a curved 3,500mAh battery, which LG announced earlier this year. LG claims the LG G Flex is the first smartphone to use a "self-healing" coating on the back cover, which is elastic and can recover from daily wear-and-tear nicks and scratches. Like the G2, the G Flex positions the volume and control buttons on the back surface, rather than the sides edges. Other unique features of the G Flex include QTheater, which gives users quick access to photos, videos, and YouTube from the lock screen; Dual Window split-screen multitasking; Swing Lockscreen, which alters the appearance of the lock screen depending on how the G Flex is held; Face Detection Indicator to let users know when the G Flex sees their face; and Camera Timer and Urgent Call Alert, which flash the LED on the rear key to indicate the timer is counting down or there is an emergency incoming call. The G Flex runs Android 4.2.2 and is powered by a 2.26GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor that is paired with an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM. The main camera rates 13 megapixels and the user-facing camera rates 2 megapixels. It includes Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and support for various LTE networks. The LG Flex will be available in Korea starting in November, and availability in additional markets will be announced later.


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