From a design standpoint, there’s no doubt that Samsung’s Galaxy S6 edge is the most striking device we’ve seen all year. But its curved display isn’t just a gimmick — as Business Insider’s Jim Edwards found out, it adds a lot to functionality as well.
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Edwards, who uses both an iPhone and a Galaxy S5 as his two primary devices, recently tried out the Galaxy S6 edge and was really taken with how the device used its curved side panel to deliver important notifications.
“I really liked being able to ‘use’ my phone passively for notifications without having to switch the whole thing on,” he writes. “In that way, the Edge screen is a little bit like the Apple Watch. It took a long time before people realized that the watch was not a replacement for the iPhone, but a filter for certain notifications that saved you from reaching into your pocket every two seconds for the phone.”
The one downside of the phone, it seems, is that not enough apps’ notifications are designed to take advantage of the S6 edge’s unique form factor. And given how fragmented Android already is, we can’t imagine app developers are jumping at the chance to tweak their apps’ code just to have their notifications properly display on the S6 edge’s side panel.
That said, Edwards was impressed enough with the device to declare that “I don’t want to go back” to using phones that don’t have S6 edge-style displays.
