A Korean YouTuber has finished a somewhat bizarre feat that involved opening and closing Samsung’s recently released Galaxy Z Fold 7 200,000 times over the course of several days.
Livestreamed on the Tech-it channel, the stunt was framed as an extreme real-world durability test and also as a public challenge to Samsung’s claims about the toughness of the phone’s hinge and folding display.
In order to avoid keeling over mid-stream — and possibly to reduce the chance of suffering a hairline wrist fracture — the YouTuber took regular breaks for sleep and meals, and was also careful to perform occasional stretches during the marathon folding sessions.
So, how did the phone do after 200,000 folds in an absurdly short amount of time? Well, as the task progressed, Tech-it carefully observed the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and recorded anything of note.
Worryingly, a reboot error — one of many — first occurred after only 6,000 folds, and then at around every 10,000 folds.
After about 46,000 folds, creaking noises could be heard coming from the hinge of Samsung’s flagship foldable handset.
In a weird turn of events, after around 75,000 folds, “an unknown black liquid came out of the hinge,” though it didn’t appear again after that.
At 175,000 folds, all of the phone’s speakers packed up.
The only upside appeared to be that the hinge mechanism became smoother over time, but that’s really not much of a bonus if the rest of the phone is packing up.
In response to people asking why they didn’t just build a machine to open and close Samsung’s phone, Tech-it said it wanted to perform the folds under an “actual usage environment,” in other words, using human hands.
Of course, no one is going to fold such a phone 200,000 times in a matter of a few days … well, no one except this YouTuber, that is. So in the real world, how long would it take to complete this many folds? Well, if you opened such a phone around 50 times a day, it’d take about 4,000 days to reach 200,000 folds, or about 11 years. But if your Fold 7 starts rebooting after just 6,000 folds, that’s just 120 days.
When it launched the Galaxy Z Fold 7 last month, Samsung claimed that its latest foldable OLED panel “remained fully functional after a 500,000-fold durability test,” though Tech-it’s test pointed to faults occurring in areas other than the display.
Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, so we’ll wait to see if any of the phone’s users report their own issues in the coming months.
In the meantime, find out what happened to the Galaxy Z Fold 7 in a durability test that took just a few minutes to complete, rather than days …
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