While Samsung, Huwaei and LG are still struggling to unveil their folding smartphone brands a new consumer electronics company Royole has stolen the show with its very own flexible display device. This is FlexPai, a 7.8-inch hybrid device can fold 180 degrees and transform from a tablet into a phone, albeit a bulky one.
The company is now showing off a working version of the FlexPai that will be available as a consumer device in China with a base model that will cost $1,300 (UGX 4.8 m) minus taxes. That gets you 128GB of storage, but you can double it for an additional $150 (UGX 550,000) and add an additional 2GB of RAM for a total of 8GB.
The spec sheet doesn’t end there, it comes with a 2.8Ghz, eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the display resolution is 1920 x 1440 when fully expanded, and it comes with a 3,800 mAh battery. You can check out all details on Royole’s website right now. Royole says the Chinese consumer model and the developer version are slated to ship in December.
It basically looks like a first-generation product. So expect extremely sluggish software and speaking of software it runs custom Water OS (a fork of Android 9.0, Royole says) is probably not the most robust operating system just yet.
This hybrid phone is more of a hardware innovation of making a virtually unbreakable AMOLED display, with a reasonable enough battery that can sustain the folding process. Royole says the screen can withstand being folded 200,000 times. (We wonder what happens after that). We wonder what Samsung will release to counter this.
