By M&M Reporter
The age of foldable smartphones is finally here. On Wednesday this week, start up device manufacturer Royole launched the world’s first foldable phone FlexPai in Beijing.
Royole is initially selling the phone through pre-orders from customers in China.
Pre-orders opened for FlexPai that has been priced at between Sh130,000-Sh190,000 depending on the package.
First phones are expected to be shipped to customers in December.
The FlexPai is a tablet with a 7.8-inch display. The main feature is that the screen can be folded in half, but unlike some Android devices that used two screens for the effect, the display is a single panel that bends enough for the phone to halve in footprint.
While conventional thinking would have the folding screen on the inside of the phone, similar in concept to a flip phone, the California-based Royole opted to put the screen on the outside of the fold, solving the problem of causing too much stress or creating a crease on the screen.
When flat, it offers a full screen to use, at a resolution of 1920 by 1440 and a pixel density of 308ppi. When folded, the screen divides up into three sections, with the 390 by 1440-resolution spine area able to display messages and notifications, while the front and rear are used more conventionally.
The folding system allows for the novelty of having a large screen available to view when taking photographs using the 20-megapixel telephoto and 16-megapixel wide-angle camera. Since the cameras are on one side, users can fold the phone and see the preview on both the front and back sides, which also allows the subject to know what the image will look like.
Running on the Android 9.0 fork Water OS 1.0, the Flexpai is powered by an octa-core Snapdragon processor clocked at 2.8GHz, with Adreno 640 graphics and 8 gigabytes of RAM. While it includes 256 gigabytes of storage, it also offers memory card expansion by up to an extra 256 gigabytes, and is powered by a 3,800mAh battery.