Chinese Company Reveals Foldable Phone
Innovation is what fuels us. Innovation is what keeps us going. Innovation is what changes our world, often positively. Countless people around the globe are always looking for new, innovative technology that can be implemented into their lives. Electricity, the internet, cars, and many more innovative goods have become a part of our daily lives in America. We are always searching for the next significant technological leap, and it appears that this leap has arrived with the creation of the long-awaited, fully-functional, folding smartphone.
A small and seemingly obsolete company in China known as Rouyu Technology has recently unveiled a new smartphone called the Rouyu FlexPai. The FlexPai is the first ever foldable smartphone that has been put up for sale, making these small Chinese company a large part of technological history. The device seems to be a simple tablet (similar to an iPad) at first glance, as Extremetech confirms that it has an enormous 7.8-inch screen. While it can be used as a large and convenient tablet, it can also be folded in half to a pocket-sized phone. This allows the user to have a tablet that they can fold to a more portable size and back, or have a small phone that can be extended at will.
Why, one may ask, would we want the ability to fold our phones? The largest benefit is the ability to have a larger screen to view whenever you want. For instance, you could be sitting on a public bus, take your foldable phone out of your pocket, start watching a YouTube video, then double the screen size so you can get more enjoyment out of the digital content. Yet another benefit could be having larger text or images, this would be the most useful when used by those with impaired vision. If you would rather have a tablet than a phone, you could primarily use it as a tablet, but fold it into your pocket for easy concealment and transportation. Portability is a very important part of mobile devices like phones, tablets, laptops, and gaming systems, having the ability to alter the size of your device would give the user the ultimate power of portability.
On the other hand, this new and innovative technology is still in a very early stage of development. While a working model will soon be purchasable, it will be full of problems that could sacrifice quality for flashiness. BBC reports that the phone from Rouyu will only be able to fold 200,000 times without sustaining damage. This may sound like a lot of use, but given the fact that the smartphone would likely be folded multiple times every day, it would not last very long. Another large issue is the size of the phone while it is folded. While the screen itself would be smaller and more portable, the device will be twice as thick while folded. Gizmochina says that the Rouyu FlexPai would be an astounding 15.2 mm thick, which is just less than twice the size of the iPhone X if the two halves of the device folded perfectly onto each other. Since they are split, it will be even thicker than that!
Fortunately, the more relevant and successful company Samsung is rumored to be revealing a similar smartphone sometime soon, as BGR reports that Samsung officials posted an image of the company logo folded in half on social media this week. There have been rumors of Samsung and a variety of other tech companies developing foldable devices, but none have surfaced until now. It is expected that this brand-name foldable phone would be of much better quality than the one made by Rouyu.
It is inevitable that we will be presented with innovation time and time again for the rest of time, but foldable smartphones and tablets are a massive step in a new direction. We see small innovations like a better version of an old camera, a remaster of a video game, or a software update on a laptop, but completely new technology of this scale does not arise often, so it is our job to embrace innovation in order to keep advancing our society. Without innovation, we would still be in the stone age, but we have evolved. We will continue to improve ourselves for the rest of our lives, one fold at a time.