Samsung had announced that they will be launching a phone that folds, but we still haven’t gotten any official release date yet. Samsung had teased the phone in an old video which was released a while back, and since then, the company has maintained that they are working on it.

But, while we all were waiting for Samsung’s foldable phone, a start-up called Royole, released their version of a  foldable phone and earned themselves the label of the world’s first completely foldable smartphone. Even though they have a pretty prestigious label on them for being the first in the world, the idea seems to be completely taken by Samsung.

The FlexPai, was launched in Beijing, and allowed interested customers to book the phones, with a delivery date of December. It has two cameras, a 20 MP telephoto camera, and a 16 MP wide angle camera. You can fold the device from a 7.8-inch tablet, to a smaller phone, and the makers claimed that the phone can be folded about 200,000 times without a problem. But what happens after that?

The device will run on Android 9.0 (Pie), and will be using a UI, named the Water OS.  But the thing that surprised me, is that the company announced that the phone will run on Snapdragon 8150 chip set, a chip set, that hasn’t even been announced yet. 

It seems like the company was in a rush to be the first, to launch the world’s first foldable smartphone, but decided to release a device that still looks like a “developer model”. In a few videos released by users at the launch, the phone seemed to have glitches and the touch sensitivity seemed unsatisfactory. Also, don’t forget, how there aren’t any apps that would support this configuration.

The phone starts at a price of Rs. 94,000, and offers a fairly sluggish device that seems to glitch a lot. I think I’ll just wait on Samsung.