The time of the year has come when innovators are ready to showcase their amazing technologies for which they worked hard day and night as CES will mark its beginning for 2019.
CES is the world’s gathering place for all those who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. It has served as the proving ground for innovators and breakthrough technologies for 50 years — the global stage where next-generation innovations are introduced to the marketplace. It’s been taking place since 1967 and is staged by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), a trade organization that represents over 2,000 consumer tech companies in the U.S.
Before CES began, rumors were spread everywhere that foldable smartphones are making their way in the event this year. The year’s trade show has humongous tittle-tattle that foldable smartphones would be a big now this year but as far as we have seen no big companies like Samsung, LG have show cased any such thing.
FlexPai is the world’s first commercial foldable smartphone with flexible display, a combination of smartphone and tablet.
Also check: Xiaomi’s Foldable Smartphone with Triple-fold Design Leaked Online
The smartphone is from a company called Royole. Launched in October in china, last year. The phone is based on the company’s own flexible AMOLED display technology. The company is planning to bring the FlexPai to the US market by the end of march, according to Florent Meng, Brand Director of Royole.
The phones that are displayed at CES 2019 were the developer units which has some error in their codes or functioning. They are all in their beta version. But at least we got to know the overall functioning of the phone to get an idea how it will work. The event provided us the view of how life would be after the launch of foldable smartphones.
Say goodbye to broken screens Unfold the next decade.Royole
FlexPai have its fold outwards which contrasts with the ZTE Axon M. This type of folding you will see for the first time. When it folds, the size of the phone is 7.8 inch, same as of a tablet. The company has played with some solid punchy colours and the response of the touch is worth appreciating. Royole claim that the display has been designed to withstand bending over 200,000 times.
The display of the screen consists of a slight bump at the middle and is not flat as expected. In terms of specifications, the FlexPai is powerful. It uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC, with two RAM and storage flavors — one with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage and another with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The phone runs on Android 9 Pie with the company’s custom Water OS skin.
FlexPai will be start shipping the other countries by the end of march or early April, with an expected starting price of $1,600 (around Rs 1,12,000). The delivery to India is still a question mark as the company is figuring out things with local distributers here. Hopefully, you might just see this on store shelves this year itself, if things work out.
flexible OLED technology has come a long way from being just a gimmick and the FlexPai is the first product that you can buy, which makes it special. This would be interesting to see whether foldable smartphones would be able to rein the market or are just hype.
We’ve seen flexible OLED displays on products before but those are already pre-bent into a desired shape. The FlexPai is one of the first products that lets the user manipulate the form of the display. With top players like Samsung jumping on the foldable phone bandwagon, we might see big advances in this technology really quickly.
The design of the phone is surely grabbing attention from all around the globe but maybe not lot of people will be ready to buy it since the design should be more practical. The foldable design also makes the phone heavy to carry. The large size and weight would make it difficult to put the phone in pocket.
So Royole gives us our first ever foldable smartphone which obviously raises a lot of questions with it. But it surely has provided us the idea as how the world of smartphones would be in upcoming years.
