Royole announces foldable FlexPai smartphone

[Redaktion]

A California-based electronics firm called Royole has unveiled the FlexPai foldable smartphone, seemingly beating tech giants like Samsung and Huawei in the race to release a truly flexible device. The FlexPai will operate on Water OS (based on Android 9.0) and should feature a Snapdragon 8-series SoC. Apparently, the handset has passed an unnamed bending test over 200,000 times.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Royole-announces-foldable-FlexPai-smartphone.354596.0.html

[S.Yu]

Interesting, these people call themselves Chinese though.
I asked about the shipping date on the first article I saw reporting about it, but my comment was blocked, lol.
If everything reported is true about this device, then it ships with a *7nm* SD8 series SoC, in December. Definitely an earlier debut for the next SD flagship than expected, could look really bad for the Kirin who was counting on enjoying a ~5 mo. head start.

[Nexus7]

It weighs 320g!!

The folding concept is better implemented as a phone that folds into something much smaller. Not like this where the phone opens into a tablet. What good is this? People who want a tablet will simply buy a tablet, rather than paying $1300 for a phone that they can't carry around comfortably.

[S.Yu]

It weighs 320g!!

The folding concept is better implemented as a phone that folds into something much smaller. Not like this where the phone opens into a tablet. What good is this? People who want a tablet will simply buy a tablet, rather than paying $1300 for a phone that they can't carry around comfortably.

Not possible with current technology. You can't fit any more battery into a smaller body while the folding mechanism itself is a somewhat less efficient use of space to begin with. To maintain a decent battery life you need a bigger device and to justify the larger body you need a larger screen, because at the other end of the spectrum you'll need to sacrifice SoC and radio performance for power conservation, which doesn't make business sense, nobody's even making low end SoCs on the most efficient nodes.