THIS COMPANY MIGHT JUST BEAT SAMSUNG WITH A FOLDABLE PHONE

Foldable smartphones have felt like they've been on the cusp of arriving for years, but outside of a couple of concept designs and trailers, we have yet to see one actually become a reality.

The Royole Corporation could actually win this race now though with the FlexPai, a tablet-sized phone that can be bent into a shape the size of a small paperback book. 

Now, before you get too excited about the era of foldable smartphone being upon us, you might want to watch the video below that features the device. The phone does not fold flat, so it ends up pretty bulky when packed away. The software also seems to go all strange when the phones screen is bent, with the display flashing a couple of times before picking an orientation.

This is the "world's first foldable screen phone" released by Rouyu Technology, which will use the Snapdragon 8150 processor, but its design is very rough, just to seize the "first", this is a futures product. pic.twitter.com/M0v9o2z0Bw

— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) October 31, 2018

Internally, the device features a Snapdragon 8-series chipset and prices will start at ¥8,999 (around $1,290) for a model equipped with 6GB of RAM. Pre-orders opened on October 31st, with orders planning to ship in December.

Royole's FlexPai is due to have some pretty serious competition very soon. Samsung's foldable smartphone is set to be making an appearance next week at its yearly developer conference, and both LG and Huawei are reportedly developing foldable handsets of their own too.

It really feels like we're on the cusp of these devices actually releasing, but then it's felt like that for a while.