An editor from Ars Technica shared the misadventure that happened to him with a Pixel Fold, Google’s newly formalized foldable smartphone.
Ron Amadeo had owned a Pixel Fold for just four days, and to believe it, he had used it very little. A white line, the height of which only increased over the hours, appeared at the bottom of the screen after four days. According to him, this is due to a handling error as much as a design defect.
The OLED panel of foldable smartphones is protected by a plastic film, and “all the companies that manufacture these screens leave a margin without plastic layer around the edge of the screen, a place where the raw — and very fragile — OLED panel is exposed to the world.” Samsung has worked on this. Future Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5 will be dust and water resistant.
Pixel Fold’s screen is probably dead due to tiny dust
According to the editor, a dust got into this very thin band when he closed his Pixel Fold, which would have been enough to break the slab. He also points out that the edges of the appliance are too high : when closed, the two halves of the screen almost touch each other, which leaves no margin when an object or a particle gets stuck between the two elements.
To read – Apple will make iPhones much more resistant, props have to worry
The difference between a working smartphone and a broken “foldable” is perhaps only a millimeter. Indeed, the height of the edge of the Oppo Find N2, for example, is 0.8 mm, while that of the Fold is 0.3 mm. This larger space between the screens when they are closed undoubtedly allows the Find N2 to be more “tolerant” to dust. By design, foldable smartphones have notorious durability issues. Will this kind of testimonial continue to come in once the Pixel Folds become more widely available, or will Google come up with a solution?
Source : Ars-Technica
