Hands-on With the Samsung Continuum Galaxy S

Samsung's newest Galaxy S phone has a very neat trick up its sleeve. It turns one big screen into three different discrete sections!

We got some hands-on time with the Samsung Continuum phone on Monday night. As we've reported before, this is Samsung's innovative take on its Galaxy S-based Android phones, but this one's trick is that it has a "second screen."

While Samsung may be marketing it as a dual screen "ticker" display, which we found to be pretty a fairly innovative way to quickly access phone alerts without having to turn the entire screen on. Check out the full specs and details of the Samsung Continuum here.

Now the real trick pulled by Samsung here is that the Continuum doesn't feature two displays at all. Rather, it's just one big 4-inch display that's been cleverly sectioned off by the phone's navigational touch buttons (which are also part of the screen). Due to the nature of AMOLED displays, this trick works because black pixels are not lit, so when the 1.8-inch "bottom screen" turns on, the top 3.4-inch portion is essentially off.

This kind of trick wouldn't work using LCD technology, but it was very clever of Samsung to employ its AMOLED to make this possible.

Either way, it's potentially more efficient use just the bottom screen when you're checking the time, switching tracks, or checking messages.

We had a hands-on demo from Samsung last night. It was a dark and noisy room, but we recorded it for your viewing pleasure. Check it out below!

And for a size comparison against an iPhone 4: