Samsung's Cling Band Concept Hints at Its Vision for Future Wrist Phones

From CNET: Samsung's ambition to make OLED displays bendier than Simone Biles never fails to delight and impress us. I was especially excited to see that among its rollable, foldable concepts at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was the company's first attempt at making a wrist-worn watch, which it's currently calling the Samsung Cling Band.

Samsung has a strong track record of making phones, smartwatches and fitness bands. The Cling Band is an amalgamation of all of these devices, but it's also something new altogether. In candy bar mode, it looks like a standard phone, but with a series of ridges alongside its backside below the camera module. But when it's in "backbend mode" -- as I feel compelled to describe it -- it curves over to create a perfectly domed bridge.

I'll be honest, Samsung's wrist phone concept is more rough and ready at this stage than the more polished Motorola concept, which we also saw at Mobile World Congress. But there's a real novelty factor in being able to flick a phone against your arm and watch it curl around your wrist, just like the slap bracelets of my childhood. As with other foldable phones, you can see creases in some parts of the display, but the bulk of it was remarkably smooth when it's curved.

One of the two samples I saw had a working display and I was able to do some basic scrolling, although most of the time this just resulted in the image on screen zooming in and out. The Cling Band definitely looked coolest when it was displaying a gallery of photos all of the way around. Perhaps a wrist-worn phone could make a genuinely interesting, customizable fashion accessory -- much more so than more established wearables, such as smart rings, smartwatches and glasses.

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