Samsung might have grabbed all the headlines when it showed its bendable smartphone on stage for the first time late last year, but a small Chinese startup has beaten the South Korean tech giant to market. 6park.com
Meet FlexPai from Royole, the world's first truly foldable smartphone, which you can buy right now for $US1318 ($1850) directly from the company's website. 6park.com
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The world's first bendable phone in action
6park.com 6park.comPreviewed at CES this year, FlexPai from Royole is the world's first truely foldable phone. 6park.com
I spent some hands on time with the device at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, and it was both brilliant and heartbreaking at the same time. 6park.com
Here's why. 6park.com
6park.comAdvertisement 6park.com[iframe][/iframe] 6park.com 6park.comFlexPai is a 7.8-inch tablet that — with its flexible display — can bend around a 180 degree hinge to turn into a smartphone. In smartphone mode you get two 4-inch displays with an option to turn one side off to save power. There's a reassuring snap when you fold it, and the screen makes a fairly seamless transition when switching modes. 6park.com
Royole says that the device can be bent more than 200,000 times before the screen starts showing signs of wear, which is equivalent to more than100 folds every day for five years. The screen itself also uses no glass, reducing the chances of it breaking or being easily scratched. 6park.com
6park.com 6park.comThe rubber hinge isn't the prettiest, but it works.CREDIT:KRISHAN SHARMA 6park.com
Other than the ability to use the device as a tablet in its unfurled state and a smartphone when in it's fully bent, Royole has added some extra functionality that takes advantage of its hybrid form factor. 6park.com
Firstly the phone has a dual SIM card tray so you can dedicate a SIM for each side of the handset. Or you can prop up the phone in a tent style mode for multiplayer gaming, where one player can use one side of the screen and play against a friend staring at the other. It's a great idea, but Royole is going to need developers to actually make games that take advantage of it. 6park.com
Advertisement 6park.com[iframe][/iframe] 6park.comThe feature that may be most appreciated here is the ability to use the main camera facing forwards or backwards. If you're taking a photo of someone else, both you and the subject can see the shot before it's taken, with the camera's viewfinder displaying on the back screen and on the front at the same time. There's an option to also disable the viewfinder on the back if you prefer. 6park.com
When folded, there's a notification bar that appears alongside the hinge so you can watch videos without interruption on the main screen as incoming messages and emails are displayed on the edge. 6park.com
6park.com 6park.comAs a tablet the FlexPai is a decent size, but it isn't perfectly flat.CREDIT:KRISHAN SHARMA 6park.com
The screen itself is a 1920 x 1440 resolution AMOLED display, and the bendable panel was developed entirely in-house. Royole invested over $US1 billion dollars in a factory in Shenzhen to manufacture its bendable screens, which can also be used on other items such as handbags, hats and shirts. 6park.com
On the inside it's running the latest flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor, with 6GB of RAM for the 128GB model and 8GB of RAM on the 256GB variant. There's a fingerprint scanner, USB-C port and it runs its Water OS on top of Android 9 Pie.