This year, at least in the two months that we have been in 2019, it seems that it is the year of folding smartphones. Both Samsung and Huawei have already submitted their bets for this year with the Galaxy fold and Huawei Mate X respectively. However, when it seemed that everything was invented in the world of smartwatches, we were very wrong.
The manufacturer Nubia has just presented the final version of a prototype that it presented last year, a smartwatch with a folding screen, a model that was slightly shown in the past MWC 2018. Nubia puts at our disposal a smartwatch with a flexible OLED screen that wraps around our wrist.
The Nubia Alpha, as this device has been baptized, offers us a four-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 960 x 192 pixels, a screen that has been manufactured by Visionox, an expert manufacturer of flexible screens. According to the manufacturer, it is the largest flexible screen in the industry, a screen that is protected by a heat resistant polymer called Polyimide, in addition, the Nubia Alpha resistant to water, not only to splashes.
This device is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor, a processor with more than a year on the market, and that it has a more up-to-date replacement, the Snapdragon W3100 from the same manufacturer. It is managed by 1 GB of RAM, has 8 GB of internal storage and the battery has a capacity of 500 mAh, with which, according to the manufacturer, it is able to last a couple of days without going through the charger, something that I sincerely doubt a lot with that screen. The operating system is proprietary and is not based on a fork of Wear OS.
The Nubia Alpha is available in bluetooth and black versions for 449 euros, a 4G eSim variant also in black for 549 euros and the 4G eSIM version with an 18-karat gold coating for 649 euros. All these models will hit the market throughout this year, although the manufacturer has not confirmed the approximate date of market launch.