CES 2019: The FlexPai is the first foldable smartphone with a Snapdragon 855 SoC

I believe I just witnessed the most magical thing happen in front of my eyes, as the Founder of ROYOLE, Bill Liu, took on the stage by showing off the company’s first foldable smartphone known as FlexPai over at CES 2019.

Not only the FlexPai is a commercially working smartphone that is already selling from US$1319 (RM5429), it is also the very first Snapdragon 855 powered smartphone that you can buy for now, and upgradeable to support 5G networks at a later stage. In other specifications, you get either 6GB RAM or 8GB RAM with 128GB and 256GB storage respectively, there is also a dual 20MP+16MP camera setup and a 3800mAh battery with the company’s proprietary Ro-Charge 5V5A quick charge support.

The company behind FlexPai isn’t just any new startup, as it has been manufacturing flexible display solutions for both enterprise and consumer products, they manufacture other products such as a rollable keyboard, flexible display T-shirts, and a smart writing pad.

As Bill puts it, the FlexPai is a device that will not have screen crack issues because it doesn’t employ glass on its screen, the idea behind this product is to have both a tablet and smartphone in your pocket. When unfolded, the FlexPai turns into a 7.8-inch tablet with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Once folded, there’s two different display aspect ratios on each side, an 18:9 for portrait usage and a 16:9 for landscape usage.

If you are worried about reliability, the company’s 2nd generation flexible display has been bent tested for 200,000 times to be equipped on the FlexPai.

The FlexPai ships with Android Pie and like any Chinese smartphones, it has its own skin on top called Water OS, my first impressions of the software experience is pretty good, not only it switches its UI fast when folded and unfolded, most apps tend to run fine on it too. As for the display mode, you can have it play different content on each side of the screens or mirror the content you are watching on the main display, FlexPai also sells a flexible keyboard for those who wants to use it as a computer on the go.

For now, you can already purchase the developer edition of the Flexpai over at ROYOLE’s website, while the consumer edition, which is presumably cheaper, will arrive at a later time. I’m pretty hyped about what I saw and while I won’t just buy this immediately, I’m definitely looking forward to own a foldable smartphone.