Samsung has spoken of releasing its first foldable smartphone-tablet hybrid, and it's been the talk of the tech town. However, Royole, a consumer electronics company, just stole some of Samsung's thunder by releasing its own flexible display device. It' called the FlexPai, and it's a 7.8-inch hybrid device that can fold 180 degres and transform between a tablet and a phone.

Many have speculated that Samsung's foldable technology wouldn't work, or at last not very well, but this newest release has proved that it is possibl.e At an event in San Francisco, Royole brought out a working FlexPai, and the people at Verge got to test it out. They reported that the folding feature works as advertised. However, they did say that the phone feels bulky and it still has a long way to go to really feel like a piece of high-end, modern technology.

The FlexPai will be available in China with a base price of about $1,300. You can pay the same amount if you live in North America and get a developer version with 128 GB of storage. However, buys should be aware that it's very much a first-generation product. According to Verge, "The software seemed extremely sluggish, apps continuously opened accidentally, and the orientation kept changing randomly when one of the Royole representatives was demonstrating the folding process." This indicates that their OS, a version of Android 9.0, isn't themost robust operating system just yet.

However, this is still a huge breakthrough in technology, as it's the first practically unbreakable AMOLED display with a bttery strong enough to handle the folding process - at least up to 200,000 times, that is. Royole didn't comment on what would happen after this amount of folding was passed. We can't wait to see how Samsung's version f=differs and what improvements on this type of device are made in the future.