Royole puts its flexible display tech into an Alexa-enabled smart speaker

The company behind one of the first foldable smartphones is bringing its bendy display tech to a new product: speakers.

Royole, the Chinese company that makes the foldable FlexPai smartphone, unveiled the Mirage, an Alexa-enabled speaker with an 8-inch wraparound flexible OLED display at CES. The speaker is expected to go on sale later this year and costs $899.

In theory, the Mirage is a bit like Royole’s answer to Amazon’s Echo Show. Instead of a square, boxy speaker, it’s round with a display that wraps around the front. It also has a 5MP camera built in, though it’s unclear if the Mirage’s camera will function similarly to the camera on the Echo Show, which can be used for video calls.

Luckily for Royole, the speaker so far looks a lot more polished than the original FlexPai we first saw in 2018. While the phone we previewed had buggy software and a hinge that made an audible crunching sound, the Mirage looks like a finished product. 

During its press event at CES, the speaker only played a promotional video, but the sound was loud and clear, and the curved display and “floating” design definitely differentiates it from other speakers. It might seem a little gimmicky (most bendable screens do at this point), but it’s not hard to imagine the company coming up with some cool use cases for the Mirage’s curved display, like visualizations that change with your music or animations that correspond to timers.

Whether that’s enough to get people to plunk down $899, though, is another matter. Royole has a history of putting its flexible displays in unexpected places — the company has previously collaborated with Louis Vuitton on leather handbags that can display custom images and videos — so it’s clearly counting on there being some appetite for a more premium speaker.

For Royole, the Mirage is also an opportunity to flex its bendy display tech. While many companies are still only putting out prototypes of products with flexible displays, Royole has had a product on the market for more than a year. And now, with Mirage, it’s proving flexible displays are for more than just smartphones.