We put the foldable phone through some grueling tests - find out if it survived. A lot of people still believe foldable smartphones are inherently much...
I think their point was to show that the hinge is “durable” because it can sustain 5 kg of weight, but when have you ever heard of a folding phone breaking because someone applied extreme force to the hinge in the wrong direction? The reasons these phones fail are consistently either the hinge failing, dust getting behind the display (through the hinge) causing the display to fail, or the display randomly cracking while being opened normally. None of these are predictable or preventable issues so a durability “test” where they take the phone and do very deliberate and stupid things with it is useless.
I feel like so much of the durability marketing from manufacturers is around things that are not actually relevant to the genuine concerns about this technology. For example, Motorola’s new razr phones have lost their dust proofing rating, yet the manufacturer tried to spin this as an improvement because they simultaneously bumped up the water resistance rating. All the tech journalists who covered the device gobbled up this marketing spin and told their readers and viewers that the new razr was way more durable than the 2023 version based on this one line. But as I’ve said, water resistance was never the key concern about these devices. Maybe the durability of this technology really is improving but we have no way of knowing this as consumers when journalists refuse to ask those hard questions or conduct proper testing.
They could have hooked the phone up to a windscreen wiper motor (a high torque motor with a crank arm) and left it to run for a few hours, that would have given them about 10,000 open/close cycles. But no, it’s “let’s hang a 5kg weight off it and use the phone as a bit of a hammer”.
Someone did a fully manual (literally had people sit there opening and closing the phones for ages) comparison of the Z Flip5 and the razr 40 last year. It was still kinda flawed in the sense that no one actually sits there doing that so quickly in real life, but at least the stress on the hinge and screen was more appropriate. They came up with a total count for each device before malfunction and the Z Flip won by a fair margin while the Motorola performed well under its advertised minimum fold number.
I think their point was to show that the hinge is “durable” because it can sustain 5 kg of weight, but when have you ever heard of a folding phone breaking because someone applied extreme force to the hinge in the wrong direction? The reasons these phones fail are consistently either the hinge failing, dust getting behind the display (through the hinge) causing the display to fail, or the display randomly cracking while being opened normally. None of these are predictable or preventable issues so a durability “test” where they take the phone and do very deliberate and stupid things with it is useless.
I feel like so much of the durability marketing from manufacturers is around things that are not actually relevant to the genuine concerns about this technology. For example, Motorola’s new razr phones have lost their dust proofing rating, yet the manufacturer tried to spin this as an improvement because they simultaneously bumped up the water resistance rating. All the tech journalists who covered the device gobbled up this marketing spin and told their readers and viewers that the new razr was way more durable than the 2023 version based on this one line. But as I’ve said, water resistance was never the key concern about these devices. Maybe the durability of this technology really is improving but we have no way of knowing this as consumers when journalists refuse to ask those hard questions or conduct proper testing.
They could have hooked the phone up to a windscreen wiper motor (a high torque motor with a crank arm) and left it to run for a few hours, that would have given them about 10,000 open/close cycles. But no, it’s “let’s hang a 5kg weight off it and use the phone as a bit of a hammer”.
Someone did a fully manual (literally had people sit there opening and closing the phones for ages) comparison of the Z Flip5 and the razr 40 last year. It was still kinda flawed in the sense that no one actually sits there doing that so quickly in real life, but at least the stress on the hinge and screen was more appropriate. They came up with a total count for each device before malfunction and the Z Flip won by a fair margin while the Motorola performed well under its advertised minimum fold number.