Royole FlexPai - the flexible phone that's a taste of the future

(Tweet pointing to this blog if you want somethign to retweet: https://twitter.com/sxaTech/status/1175364994545750016)

In January I ordered a Royole FlexPai. It took a while for it to arrive (over 5 months) but I have to admit I've really got used to it. So what's life like with a Flexible phone?

Introduction and who is Royole?

The first thing to bear in mind that it's best to think of it as a flexible//foldable tablet rather than a flexible phone. Unlike some of the prototypes shown by Huawei and Samsung this device has a thicker hinge on it that will likely put some people off as it's around 1.5cm thick at the hinge when folded but should mean it's quite durable due to the fairly large radius of the folded screen, especially compared to the tight fold of the Samsung Galaxy Fold which caused them to have to push back the release date quite considerably (due September now I believe - original release date was supposed to be 26th April) The Huawei Mate X (due November at the time of writing) has a similar design with the screen on the outside but has a tighter fold without the same gap between the two halfs when folded.

The question I keep getting asked is "Who makes it" and then "Who are they" when I say it's made by royole. Royole is headquartered in California but is a Chinese company has been producing flexible OLED displays for a while and been incorporating them into various wearable items (They demod a 0.01mm flexible OLED display in 2014) and on that basis alone they have a reasonable chance of having the experience to produce a device with a reliable screen. is the screen being external to the device a problem? Maybe, but it's not glass so won't crack or shatter, and the folding mechanism (Royole call it a "Cicada Wing") is rated to handle over 200,000 folds. While it's true that this is Royole's first attempt at a phone so they have little history in the market, it's a pretty decent new entry to the market having been formally released in late 2018. Performance-wise it's using the same very high end SnapDragon 855 platform (pre-release SnapDragon called it an 8150) which Samsung is also using in their foldable device - it has either 6GB of RAM (with 128GB Storage) or 8GB of RAM (256GB storage) and it's running an AOSP version of Android 9 which Royole call "Water OS" that has all the hooks for the foldable stuff that's on it. This does mean that it doesn't have any of the Google Play Services, or the Google Play Store out of the box, so this will likely put many people off the device since many apps  - particularly banking apps - aren't readily available on it, but I'll talk about that in a separate post. I'd already been seeing what could be run in that sort of state on another device. Perhaps because of this, the device is currently still marketed as a "developer edition" instead of a full consumer one.

Given that my list of previous phones includes Nokia's 6600, N900 (linux-based OS), it's successor the N9, a Yotaphone 2 (the one with an eInk display on the back) and a Windows Lumia 650 dual SIM, having something like this regardless of restrictions is exactly the sort of device that interests me.

So what is it like?

I've lived with it for a few weeks now so am in a reasonable position to judge what it's like. It feels like a fairly premium product, certainly not cheap. I keep warning people "Don't try to bend it the wrong way" but it looks almost like two normal phones (so it had two solid "back" panels connected via the Cicada Wing. There is a lightly visible ripple in the screen when folded but it's not really noticeable when the screen is on - perhaps something that they'll improve going forward. When folded the two outer edges snap together to keep it closed by virtue of having fairly strong magnets in them, which leads to the "party trick" of being able to do things like hang off radiators while in a half folded state. Obviously I wouldn't recommend leaving it on a radiator that was switched on ... On that topic presumable for heat dissipation reasons the instructions tell you to charge when in an unfolded state.

The display is good - it's 7.8" 1920x1440 screen which splits into three (16:9, 18:9 and 21:9) when folded - the latter being the "edge" display on the outside of the hinge used for notifications. When you fold it the screen "shrinks" itself onto the side of the phone that's facing up towards you and expands out again when you unfold it (I'll post a video later as it's great to see people's reactions when you do it), and you can flip it over and use the screen on the other side to start another app (the app you were using is still there when you flip it back - it doesn't move). This provides an interesting alternative to the Android's current "split screen" functionality (also usable when the unfolded) where you can have two apps running side by side on the screen and cut & paste between them.

There's been a bit trend recently towards edge-to-edge screens. This isn't one of those, with a fairly standard bezel around three sides and at the "top" (short edge) it has a large (~2cm) section which houses two cameras. Not having a camera on the back sounds very strange but when using it folded you get another interesting trick - both screens are active for the camera application - the person taking the photo sees the normal picture you'd expect, but any subject of the camera can see a mirror image of it at the same time before the photo is taken. It's one step up from the Yotaphone 2 that I used which displays something on the reverse e-Ink screen (random selection between the word "Smile", a picture of a camera, or a winking eye) to the subject when a photo is taken. I've even had the FlexPai sit on a table/stage mostly folded and used it to take videos which means that the subjects (me) can still see the screen while it's sitting there in front of me.

On the subject of the dual cameras (one normal, one widescreen), there's no easy way to say this but it's not great. I've often taken some fairly simple pictures where some parts of the screen are sharp and others are horribly blurred. Definitely the worst phone camera I've used in a while in comparison with my Lumias and Xperia X. Videos that I've shot on it have come out fairly well though.

The Flexpai has dual SIM slots, although one of those is shared with a memory card slot so you can't use dual SIMs and a memory card (This is reasonably common on dual SIM devices, although I've had some that can take both). Unlike many dual SIM handsets I've used which only have one 3G/4G transmitter and you have to go in and switch between the SIM you want to use for data (often taking about 30 seconds) it does appear that the FlexPai has both active all the time and can switch between them seamlessly when one loses signal. I've never seen that in any device before but it's incredibly useful. It's also worth noting that the signal strength is very good - better than any other handset I've personally used. Where I work the signal on the Three network is dire, but the FlexPai often manages to still be able to get a (low) signal on it where my other handsets can't.

There's no question that when I take the FlexPai out of a pocket and show it to people it's go the "Wow" factor. I actually like the fact that it doesn't have all the Google stuff on it (whether you're concerned by the fact it's a Chinese company is up to you) but given that the US government has been trying to stop Chinese manufacturers having access to Google services anyway maybe this is the push that's needed to make software developers make their apps available elsewhere and without mandatory Play Services dependencies. The app store that's provided on the device is almost unusable as most of the app titles are in Chinese. The best option is to find a browser in there (Opera Mini for example - it's shipped without a browser installed) and use it to download the stuff you need from there. WhatsApp, Telegram, DuckDuckGo etc. are all available outside the Google Play Store - but as I said at the start that's a discussion for a separate blog post.

It's not cheap (I've always slated Apple for pushing >£1000 devices) but it is quite a bit cheaper than the Samsung/Huawei versions will be so I'd consider it good value. I really hope Royole manage to keep going and produce more versions of this as they seem to have done a good job with the screen, the specification is top-notch so it should be relatively future-proof with the CPU. The camera is a bit of a disappointment but otherwise I love it. I had to send it back when it developed a fault and I really missed it for a couple of weeks which says quite a bit in itself. I never really thought foldable phones would be a big thing, but talked myself into it to get this one, and I'm now totally sold on the idea.

Summary

GOOD:

• Screen size for a phone - it's a pocketable tablet
• Google free?
• "Wow" factor
• First of a kind
• Seemingly dual-active SIM cards
• Fast CPU
• Good feel to the hardware and seems to have a reliable fold mechanism

BAD:

• It's quite thick and with the camera bezel maybe not "pretty" when folded (consider it a prototype!)
• No Google Play Services
• No 5G support yet
• Weak camera