The FlexPai is technically the first folding phone you can buy, but you should not



[ad_1]

This site may generate affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

We were promised a foldable phone for yearsand Samsung finally promises one in the not too distant future. However, a company you've probably never heard of beat Samsung excessively. Royole has just announced a FlexPai, a 7.8-inch folding tablet-phone hybrid. The company has shown units of work, but the FlexPai does not seem to work particularly well.

Over the last ten years, each show has featured at least one flexible OLED demo. Unlike LCDs, you can make OLED panels on plastic substrates that bend and even bend. This is how Samsung has managed to manufacture all these curved OLED panels in recent years. However, creating a screen that can fold over and over while working is another problem.

Royole says his phone can fall back more than 200,000 times without damage. When it is completely flattened, the FlexPai features a 7.8-inch 1920 × 1440 display. You can fold it in half to get a phone-like device that looks like a wallet. This gives you three screen areas: the front, the back and the edge. Of course, no application understands how to use such a configuration.

The FlexPai would run on the still-unexpected Snapdragon 8150 SoC (the successor to the 845), 8GB of RAM and 128 or 256GB of storage. It has Android 9 Pie with a completely redefined user interface called Water OS. Google services do not appear to be installed either.

In the video, you can see the interface repeatedly while the device is folded and unfolded. The response to touch is so bad that the digitizer seems to deteriorate with each decline. And then there is the screen texture, which looks like lumpy mashed potatoes. Meanwhile, Royole's images on the phone make it elegant and perfectly flat. There is still a long way to go before Royole can sell the FlexPai to consumers, and I doubt that will happen.

Calling this the first collapsible phone remains questionable enough. There is video evidence that the FlexPai is a real thing – I do not dispute it. However, this does not look like something that people will want to use, it is only available as a "developer model" at the moment. If you do not sell it as a finished product, do you really have to count as your first product? The screens could fail after a month and Royole could just shrug and remind us that it was a development material.

Royole accepts pre-orders for the developer model starting at $ 1,318 for the 128 GB version. The 256 GB is $ 1,469. The FlexPai would be shipped in December, but anyone placing an order should not expect a good product.

Now read: Huawei is looking to beat Samsung in the market with a foldable phone, the new iPhone can use LG's OLED screens instead of Samsung and the Google Pixel 3 XL OLED scores are high in the DisplayMate tests

[ad_2]
Source link