While Samsung and Huawei are those that come to mind when it comes to pushing for foldable devices, the first brand to launch a foldable device is Royole with the FlexPai. Making its debut at CES 2019, Royole’s execution was not the best out there. Outlets like The Verge remarked that while the idea of a foldable display is a welcome innovation, the FlexPai was “charmingly awful” at best.
In The Verge’s hands-on with the device, they remarked that while the young startup brand did a relatively good job in making it robust (something that plagued the original design of the Galaxy Fold but was addressed several months later), Royole failed in making the software and overall operation optimized to the groundbreaking form factor.
Over a year and a half since Royole’s debut foldable, Huawei and Samsung (and Motorola to an extent) have improved the foldable device form factor in both hardware and software. Royole has been relatively quiet for all this time—until it announced the FlexPai 2 last March and making the device official this September 22.
Images of the upcoming foldable have surfaced in TENAA, showing a form factor that is similar to the Mate XS where you have the foldable 7.8-inch AMOLED facing outwards, along with a module that houses the cameras. The said module has four cameras that consist of a 64-megapixel main camera, 16-megapixel camera, 8-megapixel camera, and 2-megapixel camera. We don’t know what are the functions of the 16 and 8-megapixel cameras, while the 2-megapixel camera is presumed to be a depth sensor.
Just like its predecessor, the FlexPai 2 will have flagship-caliber internals: Snapdragon 865, 8GB/12GB LPDDR5 RAM, 256GB/512GB UFS 3.0 internal storage, and a 4450mAh battery.
Upgraded specs aside, the biggest change on the FlexPai 2 is the foldable display. Dubbed the 3rd generation Cicada Wing, the new panel has almost 100 micro-nano materials to decrease the creasing and bending radius and make it withstand over 200,000+ bends. Royole claims that the display has a 1.3x better color gamut and 500x better contrast than a high-end LCD panel, which can be credited to a custom-designed display driver integrated circuit chip.
We should know of Royole has other surprises for the FlexPai 2 come September 22.