Royole's new 5G FlexPai 2 foldable phone revealed: This is what you get for $1,500

Royole teased the FlexPai 2, its second foldable phone, in March and now says the new and improved foldable phone with a 7.8-inch screen is on sale. 

For the moment, the foldable handset is only available in China for ¥9,988, which converts to $1,473. As promised in March, the device, with an outward-facing OLED display, runs on the latest Snapdragon 865 chipset, a Kyro 585 processor, an Adreno 650 GPU, and comes with fast LPDDR5 RAM.  

ZDNet sister site CNET has published a video of the FlexPai 2 launch in China by Bill Liu, CEO of Royole.  

The FlexPai 2 features a new hinge that's supposed to be tougher than the first version from 2018. It's also meant to be lighter and thinner than the original, but is still 12.8mm think, about 0.5 inches, thick when folded, making it slightly thinner than Samsung's new $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 2. 

The FlexPai 2's AMOLED flexible plastic display only has a resolution of 1,920 x 1,440 pixels compared with the Galaxy Fold 2's denser 2,208 x 1,768-pixel resolution on the main display.  

The device is available with either 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage or 12GB or RAM and 512GB of storage and comes with a 4,450mAh battery. The higher-specced model costs ¥11,588 or about $1,710. 

It features a four-camera setup with 64-megapixel (MP) wide lens, a 16MP ultra-wide lens, an 8MP telephoto lens, and a 32MP selfie camera.     

Royole was the first company to come out and sell a foldable phone in late 2018, but it was quickly eclipsed by newer, better-equipped foldables such as such the Galaxy Fold, Z-Flip Motorola Razr and Huawei's Mate XS.  

The FlexiPai 2 runs on Royole's Android 10-based Water OS 2.0, which adjusts according to its folded or unfolded state. Unfolded, a user can swipe left to bring up a shortcut menu of frequently used apps. 

A surface under the four cameras called the "smart control area" can be double-tapped to wake up the screen. When an app is open, a double tap will also create a split screen displaying the open app on one side and installed apps on the other side.

Liu showed two apps open side by side to demonstrate dragging a photo from one app to another. It can also be split into three windows. 

The 5G-enabled phone has nine bands covering regions that include the US, Europe and China, according to Liu.