Europe-based smartphone fans eager to get their hands on LG’s much talked about G Flex handset will be pleased to know it’s coming to the continent next month.
The Korean maker of the 6-inch flexible phone announced Tuesday it’ll be launching in 20 European countries, including the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and Austria.
Details regarding an exact release date as well as pricing haven’t yet been confirmed, although a report out of the UK last week said one carrier there is already taking pre-orders for the device, with pricing starting at £52 ($85) a month with a £79 ($129) upfront cost.
The G Flex’s curved display has been the source of much fascination among the tech crowd ever since the phone was unveiled last October, with videos popping up across the Web featuring an array of characters eagerly testing the device’s bendability. One guy even put a bullet through it in a durability test which, while bordering on the ridiculous, certainly made for some pretty stunning slo-mo footage.
If you’re intending to grab yourself a G Flex and are the type of person who might regularly bend it for comfort in moments of stress, be warned – there have been reports of particularly exuberant G Flex benders ending up with small bumps on their phone’s screen, a situation we imagine is not conducive to a decent display-reading experience.
LG itself has admitted that excessive bending of the Android device can indeed cause bumps to appear on the display, adding that the phone’s flexibility is really for “protecting the device from damage and sudden impacts such as being sat or laid on,” rather than for relentless back-and-forth bending just for the hell of it.
The Korean tech company is also marketing the phone’s top-to-bottom curve as the ideal design for making calls as it follows the contours of the face, and also makes the bold claim that it offers “an IMAX-like experience” when watching videos.
The phone has also made headlines for its self-healing back panel, a feature that causes minor scuffs and scratches to disappear within just a few minutes.
Up to now, the new handset, which sports a quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage, has only been available in South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, though several carriers in the US are also set to launch the phone before the end of this month.
[Source: LG] [DT’s in-depth G Flex review]
