 This is David with The Verge and this is the LG G Flex. This is the first smartphone in a while to offer something genuinely different. It might be the start of a huge new trend, or it might be a pointless tech demo, or it might be something else entirely. It's going to live or die based on one feature and one feature alone. It's curved display. The G Flex's 6-inch screen is subtly vertically curved so that the top and bottom curl inward and the back sticks out. It's like a crescent moon shape or maybe a banana. It's supposedly more comfortable to hold against your face, more immersive for watching movies, and less reflective because of the angle light bounces off the screen. It does seem to be ever so slightly less reflective, but by and large there's really no practical improvement or even change with a screen like this. You can tilt the phone and see the wallpaper move, although that's really awkward and laggy, and there's a cool motion for unlocking the phone straight to one of a handful of media apps. But those really have nothing to do with the curved screen. The screen doesn't just bend, though. It flexes. When you rest it face down on a table, the screen doesn't quite touch the ground, but you can press it down so that it does. You can actually flatten the phone with enough force and it just pops back into form whenever you let go. There's also a coating on the back of the device that supposedly self-heals, protecting the phone from dings and scratches. That seems to work with really imperceptibly small ones, but if you get your keys and phone in the same pocket, you're probably still in trouble. The screen's only noteworthy feature is that it bends, and it's otherwise fairly ordinary. It's a 720p display, which looks good, but can be a little pixelated and jagged at such a large size, and it's an OLED instead of a more standard LCD. And it has great colors and good viewing angles, but it's just not as stunning as some other smartphones I've seen. It's all very futuristic, using a phone with a flexible screen that supposedly heals itself. But since none of it really comes into play, what you're essentially using is LG's G2. The G Flex has the same Snapdragon 800 processor, the same 2 gigs of RAM, the same 13 megapixel camera, the same overwrought, over-designed software that looks like Samsung's TouchWiz from two years ago. Just the same everything. That's mostly a good thing, actually. The camera's fast and versatile, with lots of scene modes and wacky ways to take pictures, and the G Flex is incredibly fast and powerful for even the most intensive tasks. There's a monstrous feature list here, too. An IR blaster with a universal remote control app, a notification LED, eye tracking, face tracking, and on and on it goes. Some are really useful, and most are just pretty inoffensive. I hate LG's skin of Android 4.2.2, though, from the rows of toolbars that take up half the screen in the notification pull-down, to the ugly redesigned system and app icons. Everything LG touches here just gets worse. The slide-aside apps are a cool idea, letting you store frequently used apps off to the side of the screen, but they don't work very well. Neither do the overlaid Q apps, which show up over top of whatever you're doing otherwise. And why, dear lord, why is the Vienna Boys Choir singing my ringtone? But where the G2's heritage lets the G Flex down most is in the hardware design. The G Flex is such an impressive piece of engineering, such a futuristic object, that it really deserves something better than the slick, plastic gray shell it comes in. It's not particularly thick at between 8 and 9 millimeters, and at 6.24 ounces it's not very heavy either, but it just doesn't feel good to hold. It's huge, as any 6-inch phone is, but it's the slick, cheap-feeling body that really lets it down. The ergonomics of such a huge device are helped a bit by the power and volume buttons being placed on the back of the device, rather than the sides or the top, but it's actually a clever spot for them to be, right where your index finger goes when you hold the phone. The only problem is that the buttons are right next to the camera lens, which I keep hitting by accident. I wind up constantly cleaning the lens to get my fingerprints off. One of the best things about having a huge phone is that it can have a huge battery inside. And the G Flex does. It's one of the longer-lasting phones we've tested, and can handle a day and a half of solid use without causing any problem at all. Okay, I'll give LG credit for one thing. It did something new. And if you do spend nearly $1,000 and buy the G Flex, you'll certainly never mistake it for any non-curved phone. But other than the sheer novelty of the thing, it's just not worth buying. Even LG makes a phone with great battery life, great performance, a better screen, and a more reasonable size that doesn't bulge out awkwardly in your pocket. The G Flex is just a tech demo, a toe in the water, a proof of concept that LG can make a phone with a curved display. Maybe next time, it'll show us why a curved display is a good idea in the first place.