We tried the world's first folding phone and it actually works

Samsung may be just a few days before unveiling its own collapsible smartphone / tablet hybrid, but the consumer electronics company Royole has stolen a bit of thunder with its own flexible display device. Called FlexPai, this 7.8-inch hybrid device can bend 180 degrees and turn from tablet to phone, albeit cluttering.

Tonight, on the occasion of an event in San Francisco, Royole presented a working version of the FlexPai that we were lucky enough to keep, and the folding function works as advertised. Certainly, it feels far from the quality of a high-end modern flagship product, but it's still the first truly collapsible camera I've seen in person, not just at the conceptual video stage or the prototype stage.

The FlexPai will be available as a consumer device in China at a base price of 8,999 yuan, or about $ 1,300. You can also pay this amount in USD for a developer version if you live in North America. This gives you 128GB of storage, but you can double it for $ 150 and add 2GB of RAM for a total of 8GB.

Image: Royole

Regarding the other specifications, the device will come with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 2.8Ghz eight-core processor, the display resolution is 1920 x 1440 at full extension and a battery of 3800 mAh. The consumer model and developer version are pre-order on Royole's website right now. Royole indicates that the Chinese consumer model and the developer version should be delivered in December.

Image: Royole

It must be said that this device is really a first generation product. The software seemed extremely slow, the applications open constantly and accidentally, and the orientation changed randomly when a representative of Royole was demonstrating the folding process. For me, this indicates that the company's custom water operating system (a fork version of Android 9.0, according to Royole) is probably not the most robust operating system to date.

Image: Royole

Still, it is much more of a hardware innovation consisting in creating a virtually unbreakable AMOLED display, with a battery that is reasonable enough to support the folding process. Royole says that the screen can stand to be bent 200,000 times. (What happens after this has not been specified immediately.) We do not know how this will compare to the Samsung version, nor to any other competing screen maker like LG. But that bodes well for the impending pliable / flexible display trend that we are already seeing on the market.