The Royole Corporation introduced the FlexPai foldable handset during an event that took place in Beijing back in November 2018. They subsequently made an appearance during the CES 2019 where we managed to catch them for a one-on-one and got the first hand story of how the FlexPai came to be.
Now, at long last, the company put the phone up for sale, in the looming shadows of the Samsung Galaxy Fold borkage. With no sign of a release date from Huawei’s Mate X, in addition to the growing distrust in foldable phones, the device was set for either failure or success, no in-betweens.
In spite of this shaky start, Samsung’s display issues and Mate X’s silence turned the FlexPai into the first foldable smartphone to hit the market.
✍️Royole FlexPai Hands-On: Did We Just Meet The iPhone Killer?✍️
The device comes in three versions with the top of the range packing in 512GB of storage and 8GB of RAM while the other versions count combinations of 128/6GB and 256/8GB.
The top of the line model comes with a price tag of around $1,300, after conversion and that is still much cheaper than both Samsung and Huawei’s offers.
The device has a 7.8 inch AMOLED screen that, when folded down, switches to become a 4.3 inch. It can deal with 200,000 folds and has a battery that can be juiced up to 80% in an hour.
The FlexPai also suffered a bit of a delay when it came to a release date, as the company took their time to smooth out some issues with the Qualcomm 855 chipset, which appeared to be getting too hot, too fast.
After that situation was handled, the smartphone was released and managed to sell out on TMall in just a few hours.
While we don’t have a number on just how many units were sold so far, the company will be restocking on May 9th, so, if you wanted to grab one, you’ll have to wait until next week.
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