Royole focuses on making flexible OLED that will eventually find its way into clothing, signage, VR/AR, smartphones and more. It was a surprise when it showed a real, able to be bought now, 7.8” foldable smartphone called FlexPai.
We don’t have a lot of detail on the Royole FlexPai
- 7.8”, 180° foldable, 1920 x 1440, 308ppi, 4:3 flexible OLED (fOLED) screen
- Can be used as a tablet or as three separate areas – primary screen (16:9m 810 x 1440), back screen (18:9, 720 x 1440) and middle edge (21:6, 390 x 1400)
- Runs a fork of Android 9 called Water OS to take advantage of the screen real estate
- 16 and 20MP camera, f/1.8, OIS, HDR, flash
- Qualcomm 8XX, eight-core, 2.8GHz SoC
- 6 or 8GB, 128 or 256GB and micro-SD storage to 256GB
- Dual sim both with 4G
- 3,800mAh battery and USB-C 5V/5A fast charger
- Fingerprint reader
You can buy the developers edition (6/128GB) now at US$1,588 although we would caution you against that until you know if it supports Australian LTE bands.
GadgetGuy’s take: Bring on flexible devices
Smartphones have become the primary on-ramp to the internet, especially in Asia. Yet I find that more and more I am using the generous 6.3” Huawei mate 20 Pro for my daily internet fix.
This is an interesting device from a company that Huawei has a heavy investment in.
Samsung is also readying the Galaxy F, and although it is expected to announce it to developers soon, we won’t see in the shops any time soon.
That is because app developers and web designers will need time to add new screen formats to make the best use of the new screen real estate.
