Read that title again. That is a completely true statement. These 2 phones are some of the most important phones to be released in years. Hell, these phones are important strides in technology. There have been few devices as daring and as innovative in the hands of regular consumers. The mere fact that they exist for regular folks to buy is amazing. In fact, some people are reading this post on one right now.

These devices mark a change in the way we look at our technologies. Every now and then a product comes along and takes a bold step that begins to shift our thinking to focus on whats next, rather than what hasn’t been copied yet. What I absolutely love about these phones is that Samsung put them into standard production – for every single carrier. These weren’t limited edition phones. These are not special variants. They weren’t designed to be viewed on a show room floor and not be used – no, these devices are completely practical devices that you can use with ease every day; and they have freaking bent screens. Samsung’s foray into the curved screen device market will call for a shift in how the next generation of devices look.

The idea of curved screens is not entirely novel. Curved monitors and screens have been around for some time now. The Cinerama was one of the very first curved screens first seen all the way back in the early 1950’s. The Cinerama was a curved projector screen with 2 side angled projectors and 1 central projector. The idea was novel, but didn’t really take off.

Fast forward almost 60 years, and we begin to see the flexibility of our screens. Samsung was one of the first companies to introduce a flexible display. A proof of concept of a bending screen is still a pretty wild notion, even in 2010. Using OLED technology to achieve impossible thinness and flexibility, we begin to see the evolution of our display technologies.

Shortly after the concept, we begin to see ideas and products form. Most of them are niche products that costs thousands of dollars and only the most adamant tech nerds will own. Soon after, we see some actual consumer ideas that might make a modicum of sense. Sony introduces a large screen HDTV that has a slight curve, calling for a more immersive viewing experience. LG and other PC manufacturers begin building curved PC monitors. Then we see some pretty unique devices come down the pipeline – with Samsung championing quite a few of them. There’s the Galaxy Round, the worlds first curved phone, the Gear Fit, the first curved watch device, and the Gear S, a true to heart curved smart watch with phone service.

LG decides to try their hand at this novel method and releases the G Flex: a clever but mostly half-baked idea. Samsung finally decides to throw everything they have into the Note 4 and with it, they release the Note Edge.

The Note Edge is one of the mostly weirdly perfect/flawed devices to see the light of day in a long time. The phone is a true flagship in every sense of the word, but is still in the realm of feasibility for most consumers looking for a nice smartphone. For the first time, we can buy something that looks like something at a tech-trade show in our local Best Buy and not pay an exorbitant markup. The curved screen really doesn’t serve a true functional purpose. In fact, in most everyday use, the feature is utterly useless. Aside from the aesthetic, the edge screen provides no distinguishable advantage. That’s precisely the point though. We’ve seen these kinds of ideas in science fiction, but finally a company is bold enough to make it reality. Other impossibly unique devices have come and gone, but they’re completely impractical for 99% of consumers and commercial applications. These exist as a proof of concept that someone with lots of expendable cash can own.

Now, Samsung has released the S6 Edge. Utterly useless gimmick aside, it’s a relatively decent phone. Sure it’s not going to dethrone the iPhone as the most cherished and best functioning phone on the market, but the Edge models hold the key to next generation display technologies. In summation, the edge models are important because they mark a hopeful shift in modern display technologies. Since the original writing of this article (and its revisions) there has been a couple of niche phones that the market. The Marshall Amp phone and Commodore phone are two prominent examples of devices that are beginning to needlessly fill in “gaps” in a market that is beginning to shrink in its own ingenuity. Smartphones are passé, everyone has one. The idea of smartphones themselves is nothing special. New and innovative ideas need to come to fruition to make an already aging tech category like this feel alive again. The Edge marks the first meaningful transition towards something bigger in the category: change of form. Pushing the boundaries of the current tech to create something better. We finally have some technologies we’ve seen at trade shows and science fiction in the palm of our hands, ready for any one of us to buy and use every day. We are in the future. Let’s utilize this.

Sometimes, we do things because we CAN.

This is the kind of technology that exists merely because it can. An admittedly large part of me wants Apple to take this kind of tech and copy it verbatim. When Apple makes a move, the world follows. To me beginning to adopt a new form on a familiar technology is more important than who made it. A lot of these seemingly meaningless advancements will hopefully foster something vastly different somewhere down the line. Something better. That doesn’t mean everything we can do is a good idea. Quite the contrary, a lot of things we can do, but we need to question if we should do them. Sometimes, these ideas need to come out and exist in a practical way, just to prove we can do things a little differently, and hopefully different creates better.