The most notable feature about Royole’s third-generation Cicada Wing FFD (Fully Flexible Display) on this device is perhaps its much improved bend radius, going from the previous version’s 3mm down to just 1mm, while still lasting over 200,000 bends. This gives the phone a much better fold — perhaps much closer to, if not better than, Huawei’s Mate Xs which has a similar outward-facing flexible screen.

The panel also benefits from a boost in brightness, contrast, color gamut and viewing angle, all of which are further enhanced by a new custom driver chip. For the display nerds out there, at a 30-degree viewing angle, this panel is apparently rated with a JNCD (Just Noticeable Color Difference) below 0.6, along with 1.5-times better brightness decay.

Much like its predecessor, the FlexPai 2 has a 7.8-inch screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio when fully open. Unsurprisingly, this latest flagship is powered by Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 865, which comes with 5G radio, faster LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.0 storage. There’s also a set of quad cameras along with stereo speakers, which is what you’d expect on a flagship phone these days. Royole stopped short at providing further information, but with a Q2 2020 launch date set for the consumer market, we’ll be hearing more soon.

Chances are the FlexPai 2 won’t be the only device to leverage the third-generation Cicada Wing FFD. In the same online event, Royole announced that it has entered a strategic partnership with ZTE to explore more use cases with the former’s flexible display technology. Of course, ZTE is no stranger to the foldable phone form factor — you may recall the dual-screen Axon M from 2017, though it was a little ahead of its time.

More importantly, such partnership means Royole has finally reached the stage where it’s ready to work with phone brands, which could lead to a wider variety of flexible phones in the near future. That said, only time will tell whether Royole has the production capability to handle other manufacturer requests, let alone its own phones.

Royole

A few weeks before CES 2019 began, a curious email landed in my inbox posing a curious question: Would we like to see the world’s first commercially available foldable smartphone? Why yes. Yes, we would.

That phone wound up being the Flexpai, the brainchild of a largely unknown Chinese display manufacturer called Royole. The Flexpai was meant to be the company’s coming-out party, CEO Bill Liu told me on the CES show floor, one day before it was packed to the brim with journalists and curious onlookers. Royole had been making displays for years and had been trying to figure out new ways to squeeze its line of flexible OLED panels into more gadgets. Building a smartphone is no small undertaking, especially for a group of people who have never tried before, but Liu insisted that once his company started producing smartphones, it had no intention of stopping.

Fast forward 12 months and Royole doesn’t seem to have done a whole lot. No one has really talked about the Flexpai since last CES, and while the company will attend this year’s show, it’s been pretty quiet so far about its plans. Executives also wouldn’t confirm how many devices it’s sold in China or abroad, which I suppose makes sense. The market for a foldable phone is niche enough as it is; the market for a foldable phone from a company with no track record in smartphone design has to be even smaller. And let’s not forget that the Flexpai itself was… janky, shall we say. It worked, sure, but it was lacking in charm and its odd dimensions meant that even if people did buy one, squeezing a FlexPai into their pockets would be close to impossible.

With all that said, Royole still appears to be churning out these phones. Need proof? Just look at this foldable phone, currently being hawked by Pablo Escobar’s brother. It’s a Flexpai with a bad paint job and a surprisingly reasonable price. Kudos to Royole for landing a customer, I guess, but the momentum the company seemed to have going into 2019 has all but disappeared.

The moral: Being first is much less important than being good.

Unlike Sony, Avegant and Royole’s offerings, TCL has shrunk the technology into a pair of relatively svelte sunglasses with a polarizing filter on top. Sound comes out of speakers embedded into each arm, and the headset connects over USB-C to a compatible (TCL) phone. Rather than this being a device that you only use in the comfort of your home, TCL envisages this as something you could wear on the go, or on a train.

The two displays over your eyes are opaque enough for you to watch a movie in relative comfort, but around it everything is semi-transparent. So, if you’re on a train, and a conductor comes up toward you, you’ll have enough awareness to get your ticket out. Although the person next to you, who might hear the bleed coming from the small speakers, might not be your best friend.

In attempting to trick your brain into thinking you’re watching a 100-inch screen, the prototype does do a better job than some existing headsets I’ve tried. It was like sitting in the smallest room in a mall multiplex, the 30-seater venue for films soon to drop out of release. You’ve got a sight that’s a little bit bigger than a TV, although you’re still aware that it’s a trick.

The transparent halo around the displays is meant to be for safety and situational awareness, but it breaks the illusion that you’re watching a big screen. It doesn’t help, either, that you can’t relax or move your head while you play. Also, even though it’s lightweight, because you’re sitting so still, it’s quite tiring. When you turn your head, the screen remains in a fixed position and it is a little unsettling.

When you’re in a theater, you can look away from the screen if it’s too bright, or hunker down in the chair if your back is feeling sore — do that here and you’d bump into the goggles. It’s just unnatural because it’s a weight on your face.

At the same time, TCL showed off yet more of its prototypes for a folding phone, promising to release one at some point in 2020. The 7.2-inch “foldable tablet display concept” opens flat and closes flush, and doesn’t have a secondary display on the outside. Instead, you’ll have to open up its folds to expose a flexible, 2,048 x 1,536 (2K) AMOLED display. TCL says that the screen is rated for around 200,000 folds, although if you had to open it up every time you had a message, that might prove quite taxing.

Of course, the company won’t precisely say when it’ll actually release one of these things, but it’s happy to let Samsung and others make the first move. TCL’s representatives also said that it’s still researching the best way to fold and store a flexible display — including in a square, rather than a rectangle. But talk is easy, and we’ll judge the company’s efforts when it demonstrates a working, commercial version next year.

And as for the Visor, TCL says it’s firmly a concept for now.