20 PCWorld APRIL 2020NEWS TCL REVEALS ROLLABLE SCREEN
When closed, the tri-fold phone is quite
thick and the whole package was very heavy
and clunky. The screens looked and felt like
plastic, and the mechanism was creaky. In
all honesty, it felt a lot like
Royale’s early Flexpai prototype
(go.pcworld.com/flxp). But TCL
wasn’t showing off a polished
phone. It’s all about the
potential of what a smartphone
display can be. When TCL
launches its first phones later
this year, they’ll look much more
like traditional handsets, but
down the line, TCL is hoping to
become an innovator in thesmartphone space with its
outside-the-box displays.
And it might be able to do it.
For years, TCL has made some of
the best budget TV sets in the
business, including a partnership
with Roku, as well as the
BlackBerry Key2 and tiny Palm
phones. But with these displays,
it’s looking to combine innovation
with aggressive pricing to give
Android fans another option in
an ever-shrinking field.
Of course, interesting ideas
don’t necessarily translate into
building a good smartphone, and
the prototypes we saw gave little
indication of how—or if—they’ll
work, so we’ll have to wait and see how
TCL’s first devices stack up to their peers.
But if TCL’s concepts are any indication,
we’re in for a wild ride.TCL’s rollable display is a tablet when you need it and a phone
when you don’t.When unrolled, TCL’s prototype phone opens to a 7.8-inch tablet.