Since folding phones have more moving parts and are expected to be handled in a way that does not lend itself to delicate touches, there’s a big concern about durability. And YouTuber JerryRigEverything takes durability to heart with his popular videos of his extreme torture tests of phones. In his latest video, JerryRigEverything’s latest victim is the new Google Pixel 10 Fold, and his findings led him to call the phone “by far, the weakest folding phone I’ve ever tested.”
JerryRigEverything points out that the Pixel 10 Fold’s antenna lines create weak spots that falter when a moderate amount of pressure is applied. In his testing, not only did the Pixel 10 Fold catastrophically bend, but the battery actually exploded. Imagine if someone had the phone in their back pocket and sat down, causing the phone to bend. Granted, the testing here is extreme, but not out of the realm of a real-world situation. The risk of the Pixel Fold battery exploding could very well be a real one.
The confounding thing is that JerryRigEverything found this construction flaw with previous Pixel phones, but Google hasn’t changed the design. “Having the audacity to call the Pixel 10 Fold extremely durable during their launch event while not changing the antenna line locations from the previous two versions that catastrophically failed is an insult to tech enthusiasts everywhere,” he said.
You may remember JerryRigEverything tortured the iPhone Air about a month ago, and his results are the complete opposite of the Pixel 10 Fold. “Just like it was forged in the heart of a dying star or deep in the fires of Mount Doom, the iPhone Air has no business being this indestructible,” he said. The iPhone Air “100 percent” passed JerryRigEverything’s durability test and needed a tremendous amount of force to break.
That’s significant because, as you probably know, Apple has plans to release a folding iPhone, perhaps as early as next year. And it’s likely that the iPhone Air, Apple’s thinnest phone, is essentially one half of a folding iPhone. If one half of a folding iPhone is “indestructible,” then there’s a pretty good chance that a complete folding iPhone will be, too. Or at the very least, won’t explode under a little stress.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor, Macworld
Roman is a Macworld Senior Editor with over 30 years of experience covering the tech industry, focusing on the Mac and other products in the Apple ecosystem. He is also the host of the Macworld Podcast. His career started at MacUser, where he received Apple certification as a repair technician (when Apple did that kind of thing). He's also worked for MacAddict, MacLife, and TechTV.