JerryRigEverything has proven what many early Google Pixel Fold owners already knew: it doesn’t hold up under pressure.
Zack Nelson, the man behind the JerryRigEverything YouTube channel, started out by making videos on how to repair your phone at home. Now, he creates a wide range of tech content, including smartphone durability tests. Essentially, these involve breaking the phone, but in very precise ways.
Nelson put the Google Pixel Fold under the knife in his most recent video.
Pixel Fold owners have reported issues since the foldables release in the U.S. on June 27th. Some are from tech journalists who wrote about their experiences in detail, while others are average users who took to posting their complaints on Twitter and Reddit.
Many complaints relate to the Fold’s display, which can quickly damage and break. For those whose screen didn’t completely shut down, the quality was severely impacted with dents or even neon pink lines cutting across it.
“Foldables have been surprisingly durable up to this point,” Nelson says at the start of his video. “None of the eight folding phones Samsung has ever made have failed my tests, so Google has some big shoes to fill with this first attempt.”
Nelson has a routine, and starts with a scratch test. He checks all exterior holes, the SIM card tray, the cameras, the fingerprint sensor, etc. He also performs a dust test to see how much debris the device can handle. The Pixel Fold performs as well as any of Samsung’s folding smartphones in these tests.
When moving on to a heat test, Nelson found that upon applying the flame from a lighter to the interior screen of the Pixel Fold for about eight seconds, it completely turns off and refuses to restart for a little more than a minute. When he finally gets it to boot back up, it offers a warning that you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever left your phone on a hot car seat or your dashboard during a road trip: ‘Phone turned off due to heat.’
“In the ten years we’ve been durability testing phones, we’ve never had one turn off due to heat before,” Nelson says. “Very interesting.”
Finally, it’s time for the bend test. “The vast majority of phones survive this test,” Nelson notes. “Even the vast majority of folding phones survive.”
When attempting to push the phone backwards — the way that it’s not meant to fold — the screen quickly cracks down the middle, destroying the display. Nelson notes that Samsung’s Fold and Flip series have lockouts that prevent you from pushing the phone past its breaking point.
“Now, you might think this would be embarrassing for Google, who broadcast to the world that this is the most durable hinge ever,” Nelson says. “But, in their defence, if you look very close, it’s not the hinge that failed. It’s actually the rest of the phone. The hinge itself is still in one piece, and it’s the antenna line near the SIM card tray, and another antenna line on the longer side of the phone that did the buckling, which then allowed the center screen to stretch and break open.”
You can watch the full durability test on Nelson’s channel below.
Read out our hands-on with the Google Pixel Fold here.
Image Credit: JerryRigEverything (Screenshot)
Source: JerryRigEverything Via: 9to5Google
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