While I am impressed, I still would never actually buy a folding smartphone.
post
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you’re wondering how many times Samsung’s latest foldable flip phone, the Galaxy Z Flip 5, might survive when subjected to the stresses and strains of the real world, YouTuber Mrkeybrd has an answer for you: 401,146.
Between August 2nd and today, his channel has run a livestream of the phone being continuously folded and unfolded by a series of testers.
The experiment subjected the phones to a large amount of variation in the speed and force with which they were folded and unfolded, which arguably reflects the kinds of stresses actual people, rather than machines, will put the phone under.
But the Flip 5 appeared to be broadly usable until the 400,000 mark, when it was submerged in water and covered in flour and eggs.
Its hinge appeared to grow increasingly unusable after that point, until the YouTuber called an end to the experiment when a pink line was visible running down the right-hand side of the screen.
In a similar test last year, Mrkeybrd folded and unfolded the Galaxy Z Flip 3 418,500 times before calling the experiment to an end.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The hinge seemed to get unusable after it was doused with eggs and flour? I wonder why...
Given Samsung’s flip phone has an IP rating of IPX8, which means it’s protected against being submerged in water but isn’t protected against dust (for now), it seems likely the flour played a part in the phone breaking. But being able to survive 400,000 folds would still mean the phone should survive over 10 years of use if you unfold and fold it around 100 times a day.
Honestly I'm impressed it survived for as long as it did. I played around with a demo model last month, and I figured it'd break rather quickly even with normal use. But I guess the conclusion is as long as you take care of it, it'll be fine. Still think it's all a gimmick though.
I bought the z fold for the gimmick. I love the gimmick. Its the Pokémon pagents of phones and I'm here for it.
If the hinge is the same design as the flip4 it won't take much to break it. I went through 2 of them with a fully hinge protected case and both times the hinge would get misaligned from a small fall onto carpet.
Something tells me dunking it in water egg flour mixture is not normal wear and tear.
So are they going to start over and just flip it open and close like a normal human being or give up after few days and chuck it out of an airplane at 30k feet?
all 25 comments