BEIJING — A relatively unknown tech company has outrun all the top smartphone manufacturers by launching the world’s first foldable screen smartphone.
Yesterday’s launch of ‘FlexPai’ at an event in Beijing put Royole Corporation ahead of leading tech giants – Samsung and Huawei – in the race for world’s first phone with a flexible display.
FlexPai features a 7.8-inch OLED display with a resolution of 1920×1440 but when folded up, it presents three separate smaller screens with a ratio of 16:9, 4:3 and 18:9 – on the front, rear and spine of the device.
The folded edge screens display the notifications and other important information like previously seen on Samsung’s Edge series smartphones.
The SoC on the smartphone is 7mm Qualcomm Snapdragon 8150 series processor coupled with Adreno 640 GPU, 6GB or 8GB of RAM and three storage options – 128GB, 256GB and 512GB.
For the camera, there’s a dual camera setup of a 16MP wide-angle lens and a 20MP telephoto lens. The camera is on the left side when the device is laid out flat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooJc6hwljFY
FlexPai runs Water OS, based on Android 9.0 Pie and 3800mAh of battery with Ro-Charge fast charging technology that can charge the phone up to 80% in an hour.
FlexPai will available for ¥8999 (~$1290) for 6 GB RAM, 128 GB storage, ¥9998 (~$1434) for 8 GB RAM 256 GB storage and ¥12999 (~ $1864) for 8 GB RAM, 512 GB storage.
Royole has started taking pre-orders for the phone, promising shipments in December this year.
Both Samsung and Huawei are in the process of manufacturing a smartphone with foldable screen.
Moreover, Samsung was expected to preview its efforts at an event in San Francisco on 7 November, but is not understood to be ready to put a product on sale.
