TL;DR
- According to Samsung, the Galaxy Z TriFold’s screen is rated for 200,000 folds, and some YouTubers are trying to test just that.
- Across two multi-hour streams, they’ve already clocked 25,000 open-and-close events.
- So far the screen has held up to the use, although there’s still a long way to go.
What’s the most desirable phone around right now? For a whole lot of reasons, smartphone fans this year have been intrigued by Samsung’s Galaxy Z TriFold. Right now, it’s still out of touch for most of us (we were lucky enough to score the hands-on time you can watch above) between restricted international availability, a sky-high price tag, and limited stock causing it to quickly sell out. Eventually that will change — will you pick one up then? If you’ve been thinking at all about it, or are just curious how a screen like this phone’s holds up to repeated use, you are absolutely going to want to check out what a few South Korean YouTubers have been up to.
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Over two days, the YouTube channel OMG_electronics has run a pair of live streams where its hosts open and close a Galaxy Z TriFold… over, and over, and over again. The day one stream persisted for six hours, and resulted in over 9,000 full open-close operations completed.
Coming back for round two, the team got right back to it, picking up the count and continuing for another 10 hours, ultimately hitting 25,000 recorded folds. The plan is to eventually get to 200,000 — we wouldn’t hold our breath.
If you’re able to watch these videos without developing some sympathetic hand cramps yourself, you’re made of tougher stuff than we are. Even after all that use, Samsung’s panel appears to have held up gracefully, with no big obvious problems making themselves known.
In order to keep on track during this marathon, the OMG guys outfitted the TriFold with a pair of pressure sensors, each independently recording fold events for the phone’s two hinges.
A similar effort with the Galaxy Z Fold 7 this past summer actually did make it to 200,000 folds. While that handset did make it through the trial without the flexible display failing, the hardware did end up a little worse for wear, with the phone’s speaker of all things ultimately giving out near the end.
How will that compare to the TriFold? According to Samsung, its new foldable model is rated for 200,000 folds — although, to be fair that’s supposed to be about 100 folds a day for five years, not 10,000 folds in a single session. Presumably, that’s going to be a lot rougher on the hardware, but we’ll be super curious to see how this endurance test ultimately resolves.
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