If watching a machine test the limits of a fragile yet expensive electronics gadget to the point of its possible destruction sounds like your idea of solid entertainment, well, friends, we’ve got you covered with something of a mesmerizing video along those lines as we head into the weekend.
At the top of this post, you’ll see a video from a CNET event live-streamed to YouTube on Friday. The goal: “Samsung says the new Galaxy Fold phone is tested to last through 200,000 foldings and unfoldings,” the outlet explains in the video description. So we decided to try it out.”
To put Samsung’s much-maligned new foldable through its paces, the team at CNET borrowed a machine from SquareTade called the Foldbot. It automatically folds and unfolds the handset several times per second, and you can watch a counter in the bottom right of that stream tick off each one as the total climbs. The idea was to see how long the Fold would last before ultimately crapping out — and if you want to go ahead and skip to the end, we can tell you the result now:
CNET noted on Twitter that, while it’s not shown on the stream above, the Fold being tested ultimately dies at around the 120,000-fold mark.
119,380 folds in, we've lost half of the screen and the hinge has lots its satisfying snappiness. Keep watching here: https://t.co/VupObDxttw pic.twitter.com/Z627VRfpWR
— CNET (@CNET) October 4, 2019
At 119,380 folds in, it seems that one half of the device’s screen dies and the phone starts to be less “snappy” when folding it. The exact mark at which the phone seems to be completely finished, again per a CNET tweet, is after having been folded and unfolded a grand total of 120,169 times.
To be sure, while a torture test like this is certainly interesting from a voyeuristic point of view, beyond watching it for curiosity’s sake it’s probably not in all likelihood going to change the fate of Samsung’s first foldable in the marketplace. The phone is too expensive, introduces an unusual form factor and is way too fragile to take a gamble on — not that this has stopped Samsung from pressing ahead and planning future foldable devices, anyway.
