Royole Flexpai 2: New foldable display presented

The Royole Flexpai was the first smartphone with a foldable display at the end of 2018. It served as a prototype, was accordingly very expensive and not intended for mass production. But it did spark this movement and forced major manufacturers like Samsung and Huawei to introduce their foldable smartphones. Now the manufacturer has introduced the new display of the upcoming Royole Flexpai 2.

The first Flexpai

At the Mobile World Congress 2019 we actually had the opportunity to hold the Royole Flexpai in our hands. Even though it was equipped with the top hardware at the time, such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, it quickly became clear that Royole was not a smartphone manufacturer. The operating system was flawed, animations didn’t work and the software was overall not well adapted to the foldable display. In fact, Royole is or was until now simply a manufacturer of such flexible displays, which they have also integrated into fashion accessories, for example.

The Royole Flexpai 2 – what is different?

At the presentation, they actually didn’t show the whole smartphone yet, but mainly referred to the new display. This is the third generation of the so-called Cicada Wing, a completely flexible display. This is now supposed to be much more robust and was bent by Royole over 200,000 times without leaving any damage. Thus, even after so many openings of the display, the fold is almost not visible, as the folding radius has also been reduced to 1 mm.

Apart from that, the actual panel has also been improved. For example, there is now a 1.3 times larger color space, the contrast ratio has been improved five times and the overall brightness is also on a higher level. The OLED panel should also react faster, the reaction time is now 0.4 ms.

When opened, the display offers a screen diagonal of 7.8 inches in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Even if you concentrated on the display during the event, you could already reveal a few details. The Flexpai 2 comes with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor and a 5G modem as well as fast LPDDR5 memory and UFS 3.0 mass storage.

Outlook

Apparently Royole himself knew that the first Flexpai was not a good smartphone in itself. That’s why they have now announced a partnership with ZTE, who, for example, have delivered a powerful smartphone with the Axon 10 Pro. Royole did not discuss the partnership any further. It would be possible that ZTE would be allowed to use this display technology and Royole would receive a reasonable operating system for the hardware in return. But that is pure speculation.

What do you think about foldable smartphones? Are you up for it, or don’t you think that they can catch on?