The PROBLEM with the Foldable Phone - Royal Flexpai
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,653 words · ~8 min read
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our ces 2019 coverage is brought to you by dbrand the dbrand grip and their
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prism screen protector are a great way to keep your phone from getting damaged
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in the event of an accidental drop or
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here's another idea this right here is the royal flex pie
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the world's first commercially available phone with a flexible amoled display now
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i'm sure you guys have a lot of questions and so did i but the good news
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is i have actually gotten the answers for most of them so stay tuned because
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there are some things about this that are really cool and there are some things about this that are a little bit
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less cool so they started out in 2012 but this is actually their first phone
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they've been hard at work on this for years and they actually had to build
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their own fabrication and production line in order to make this a reality and
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it started with the world's thinnest display so they claim that the actual
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display layer of their tech here is just point .01 millimeters thick and this was
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absolutely critical to getting it to be flexible enough that it could not just
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be bent in a tight radius like this but
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it could do so 200 000 times without
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being damaged the trick here is that while flexible OLED technology has been
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around for a long time the substrate is the part that's the challenge because
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traditionally you would build it onto glass and finding a plastic that is also
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both thin and flexible and durable both
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whatever don't worry about it enough is a real challenge now they couldn't
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really give me any details as to exactly what plastic they're using but it seems
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to be working incredibly well now in terms of the operating system and specs
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it's running snapdragon 855 six or eight gigs of RAM 128 or 256 gigs of storage
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and a customized version of Android that
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they're calling water os and the reason for that is that they had to specially
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design the software in order to flow like water from one orientation to
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another so you can use it like this in tablet mode so that's uh either portrait
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or landscape mode that is a 4x3 display if you're into the mobile productivity
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you can fold it up and use it like this and you're going to end up with a 16x9
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display you can turn it around and here you've got i believe it's an 18 by nine
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display if you use it in this aspect ratio and what's cool is that you can
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either turn off the rear display in what they call uh mid brightness mode i think
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medium brightness mode or you can keep it enabled just for that like you know
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super casual hey you know no big deal but this is just the future in my hand
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kind of thing you know don't stress out about it's all good they've also got an
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edge display as you can clearly see here man that looks so cool and there's a
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bunch of functionality that you can set up in order to uh click on it there we
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go so i customized mine to have a camera icon there the camera is also pretty
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crazy so there's two cameras they're both right there which means if you want
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to take a selfie you go ahead and hit that selfie button boom switch to a
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secondary screen it uses uh it seems to use accelerometers and gyroscopes or
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whatever like traditional orientation mechanisms in order to tell which screen
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you're looking at so sometimes it's a little bit off but there you go i'm in selfie mode
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or boom you want to switch back you go there's still a little bit of placeholder chinese in the os look
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they're not planning to launch this in the u.s like anytime soon like hopefully
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sometime this year they said but they're already actually launched in china
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and then this is pretty cool you can go into whoops
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there we go dual mode and then both the user and the subject can actually
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see like preview the picture that you're taking
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i know right however
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there are definitely some things i noticed while content consumption is
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actually i would consider to be a strong point for a design like this where
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you've got stereo speakers i'm going to go like that stereo
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speakers if you're in tablet mode or
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you're going to have to switch to well effectively i mean they could still be
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pumping stereo sound but you'd only really get a mono effect out of them
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speakers in folded mode the screen
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is a bit of a weak point so one of the first things i noticed about it when i
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walked up was that on the lock screen you can clearly see what appear to be
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some kinds of like striations through the display and now initially what i
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thought was that this was because of the
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fold here either the screen had been worn out by being folded and unfolded a
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thousand times on the show floor or it was the slightly ribbed texture behind
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it that was causing it to appear that way upon further inspection though what
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i realized was that they're present everywhere so you can see under this
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file management and clock icon there's kind of a shadow that even moves around
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as i swipe the icons to the left and right now then i thought maybe this is
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some kind of a shadow that they've baked into their os as a graphical feature
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then though i switched it here and it appears as though they still run this
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way so there was something else what was the other thing that i was yeah i was using
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the play store as an example here so you can see those shadows are still down
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here so it appears to be an artifact of the display technology itself at least
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at this time another thing that was quite noticeable to me was if we fire up
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the messaging app we've actually got i mean i guess this is great for a show
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floor demo because you've kind of got a watermark on every screen but they
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clearly had demo video running on this for quite some time and we all know that
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burn-in can be an issue with amoled technology and it appears that the the
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state that they're in right now is one where burn-in is not just possible but
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even present on these show floor devices so
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state of things now this
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is really cool especially how impressively tight
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they've got the bend on this thing and now that i'm aware that the issue with
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the striations through the display is not actually the panel or is not
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actually the the bend mechanism itself that's sick
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now there's still obviously some work to do on the software side and there's
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definitely work to do on the panel side making sure that it's not burning in
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like that and improving their color accuracy right i forgot one more thing
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so comparing the play store icon and amazon icon remember these are known
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icons with my samsung note 9 in just the
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basic mode and whatever the other one is
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without the blue light filter on or anything you can see that there's not
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much color depth to the display so the subtleties of colors can get lost a
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little bit that's why that youtube play button there is like a shrieking vibrant
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red rather than the more subtle red that it would naturally be so still some work
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to do on the panel tech but very cool direction and i could
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definitely get used to the idea of having something that i can fold up put
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in my pocket check that out and then unfold and boom i'm watching full screen
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content just like that what an incredible experience for the
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future
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speaking of the future if you care about the future of your
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phone you probably want to get a dbrand grip and a prism screen protector the
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dbrand grip is impact resistant it's got
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these little lips on the front so even if you put it down on a table or whatever you're not going to scratch
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your screen it's got precision cutouts for your camera your touch sensor all
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that good stuff and they're super clicky buttons of course you can customize it
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with a skin of your choice and their prism screen protector is basically
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unbelievable it comes with an applicator so you can put it on perfectly every
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time and uh this demo is real i'm actually hammering a nail into a piece
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of wood with the front of a screen you take the screen protector off boom
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screen's still good i'm not recommending you do it i'm just saying you could if you really really really wanted to so
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check them out at the link in the video description guys don't miss any of our ces 2019
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content we'd love to see you at the next booth make sure you subscribe so that
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you know we make our we all make our appointments that's the thing at ces right Colton making all your
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appointments making all your appointments at ces did you make it to all your appointments i
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did do you cancel any today yes what i know
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dang it