Gadgetory

hey what's up guys this is Bailey Stein with Android authority and we've been hearing about flexible displays for a while now but we're finally seeing the first real product beating out big players like Samsung LG and Huawei a small company called Royal has unveiled the world's first foldable smartphone the flexpod I recently went hands-on and well here are my thoughts all right so the flexpay is more like a tablet with its 7 point a niche 1440p AMOLED display with nice saturated colors and oh yeah that display is flexible supported by a hinge and flexible plastic overlay material you can actually fold the Flex PI down into a smartphone like form factor royale says this material is rated for 200,000 folds which if you do the math it should be enough for several years of use it's undeniably pretty cool but the implementation here could be better I couldn't help but feel like I was about to break the device whenever I tried folding it hopefully we'll see improved hinge designs which don't require as much force in the near future but for now anyone can buy the flex pay starting at $1,300 that's a price most of us can't justify but there is one audience that can and that's developers royal is counting on developers to come up with use cases for this technology and aside for maybe some hardcore tech enthusiasts that's really who this product is for I have to say the pre-production unit that I played with had some really buggy software royal assured me that these issues will be resolved before the device ships though which will happen sometime in late December so what's the point of this thing it's an aggressively first generation product no doubt but its commercial release could end up being a major milestone flexible displays aren't catching on until just now arguably because few companies have been willing to make the risky investment in production facilities royal is making those investments and they're using the flex pipe to send a signal to the industry that yes this type of product is possible as more foldable devices are released we can expect suppliers to compete with each other which should help drive costs down while driving the pace of information up and that will be all for now be sure to give this video a thumbs up if you liked it subscribe to the channel and hit that Bell button to be notified when we release new videos and remember we are your source for all things Android