Of course, Shen insists in the comments section that his device was developed in-house, as opposed to basing it on a reference design from an OEM. He added that the original plan was to also unveil this device at Oppo's MWC keynote two days ago, but this was eventually cancelled, citing that "it wouldn't have been meaningful" to show it off there. According to the exec, he doesn't think such form factor adds much value to the user experience, other than the fact that it lets you enlarge the display and occasionally fold the device. Still, Shen teased that depending on how many "retweets" his post gets, his team may consider mass producing this phone. Such cheekiness.

Even though Oppo is one of the leading smartphone makers in the global market, it may make sense to hold back from competing directly against the insanely pricey foldable phones from Samsung and Huawei -- we're talking about $1,980 and around $2,600 respectively here, which says something about their production yield and costs. Meanwhile, Xiaomi's foldable phone was nowhere to be found at MWC, and it's unclear where Royole's at in terms of volumes for its FlexPai. We shall see how the giants fare later this year.