Top 5 Advantages of curved display of Samsung Galaxy Note Edge

It's been a while since Samsung tried its hand at a rounded screen, and even longer since the device-maker took a stab at anything resembling a second display. Nevertheless, here is the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge, essentially a stylus-toting Galaxy Note 4 with a curved -- and independent -- right edge that has its own purpose and behavior.

Curved like an infinity pool, the touchscreen bend on the Edge's face contains its own contextual controls, app shortcuts, and notifications that you can see and interact with without leaving whichever window you're on.

The Edge display can give you access to your top apps so you can launch them from anywhere in the OS. We didn’t have an issue with the old sliding drawer from traditional Galaxy Note handsets, but making access to favorite apps more quick and efficient is always a welcome change.

Since the Edge display can display information independently of everything else, you’ll be able to see incoming notifications no matter what you’re doing, even when viewing full-screen content like games and video. This also works for incoming calls so you won’t be kicked out of your game when an unsuspecting phone call comes in.

We’re not sure how many of you care about personal expression outside the use of your standard wallpaper, but you can customize the Edge display to show whatever it is you want when it’s not in use. You can add images and text as you see fit, including drawings with the S Pen. Samsung’s main use case for wanting to customize your Edge display is when it’s sitting inside a folio case, but we’d imagine most people would rather have the display off whenever it’s not needed.

The Ticker Board app can show live information about stocks, sports scores, live news and Twitter trends so you can keep tabs on the latest without having to tab your way through a multi-step user interface. It’s nothing a typical notification can’t handle, but it does look pretty neat.

Finally, the advent of the Edge display makes way to quick tools that can be used without much effort, including a stop watch, a timer, a ruler, flashlight control and voice recording. Samsung has it 5th on their list, but we’d probably shoot this one closer to the top of the list of useful features the Note Edge enables.