Folding phones have a bit of a public relations issue regarding durability. Past examples of folding phones have sometimes delaminated. Such is life for an early adopter of a new technology.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 was just launched a couple of weeks ago, and so naturally, we’ve all wondered how well it will fare with long-term use. Now there’s a video of a YouTuber who folded and unfolded one 200,001 times.
Check out how it did, when it failed, and why a weird, black liquid oozed out of it…
a torture test
No, the YouTube channel presenter didn’t build a machine to open and close the Galaxy Z Fold7. That’d have been a hell of a lot easier, and probably gentler on one’s sanity, but he said at one point that he wanted to replicate real-world usage of how somebody would use the Z Fold7, and what’s more real-world than two meat claws flipping it open and closed manually?
The event was live-streamed on the Tech-it YouTube channel, but it was meant as more of a torture test for the Galaxy Z Fold7 and not the person performing it. He took regular sleep and rest breaks, ostensibly for his own health, sanity, and structural integrity of his hands and wrists.
If you’ve made it this far, I imagine you’re eager to know how the Galaxy Z Fold7 performed. It exhibited some unusual behavior at specific points during the test. After the first 6,000 folds, the phone got a reboot error.
This reboot error would manifest after every 10,000 folds thereafter. People leave their phones on for long stretches without powering them off, but I’m not sure if this issue will be much of a problem in real life.
Surely an owner would update the phone’s operating system at some point before folding and unfolding the phone 10,000 times, with the accompanying operating system restart that comes with an update. Might that head off the reboot error? Maybe. Who knows yet.
The phone started to creak at about 46,000 folds. And the weirdest thing of all, a mysterious black liquid began leaking from a hinge at 75,000 folds, although it only happened once. It may have been the phone’s soul.
At 175,000 folds, all the speakers stopped working. Even though the present stopped folding at 200,001 folds, I’d consider 175,000 folds the real lifespan of the phone. Who’s going to use a phone in which the speakers stop working? You wouldn’t be able to hear anything or make a call.
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