Royole has showcased its foldable smartphone, the FlexPai at the ongoing CES 2019 in Las Vegas. The device has been available in China since October and reportedly was made available to developers from the US and UK in December 2018.
The Verge says that while the FlexPai is an ambitious project, it lags in several areas, including the software and the display quality. While changing from tablet mode to phone mode, apps were reportedly stacking on top of each other and overlapping with widgets. The quality of the device, however, is reportedly robust and the phone is capable of withstanding rough handling.
The FlexPai runs on Android 9.0 Pie out of the box with the company’s Water OS on top. It features a 7.8-inch AMOLED display with 1440-pixel resolution and it can be folded in half. The premium device is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC coupled with up to 8GB RAM and 256GB of internal storage.
It features a dual camera set up at the back consisting a 16-megapixel wide-angle camera and a 20-megapixel telephoto lens. The device does not feature a selfie camera and the display can be folded to use the rear camera for selfies.
While Royole still has a long way to go before the FlexPai is usable, it has successfully proven that it can develop a foldable smartphone. It will be interesting to see what the company comes up with next.