Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- A YouTuber is currently folding and unfolding the Galaxy Z Fold 7 live on YouTube.
- The phone has already survived over 100,000 folds.
- The goal of the YouTuber is to manually fold the device 200,000 times and see if it survives.
A Korean tech YouTuber is currently putting the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 through an extreme durability test, folding and unfolding it live on YouTube with a goal of hitting 200,000 folds. Yes, by hand. And no, we don’t recommend trying this at home unless you have a lot of patience (and nothing better to do for several days). Honestly, it’s kind of nice that the YouTuber is doing the hard work so the rest of us don’t have to.
How’s the Galaxy Z Fold 7 holding up?
As of writing this, the fold count has reached 113,368, meaning the YouTuber is likely a day or so away from reaching the 200,000 mark. It’s worth noting that Samsung officially rates the Z Fold 7’s internal OLED panel for up to 500,000 folds under ideal conditions. Still, manually folding it that many times might take over a week and probably the YouTuber’s sanity. Aiming for 200,000 folds seems like a more reasonable target.
Along the way, the YouTuber is pausing at certain milestones to check how the phone is doing. At 95,000 folds, everything appeared normal. The display was rendering colors correctly, touch sensitivity was intact, and components like the speakers were working fine.
After hitting 100,000 folds, a slight crackling sound began to appear while opening and closing the phone. Despite the noise, the inner display continued to function without flickering or visible damage.
By 105,021 folds, the screen was still fully functional, although the crease had become noticeably deeper.
Will it make it to 200,000? We think so. Samsung has used a 50% thicker Ultra Thin Glass (UTG) layer on the inner display of the Fold 7 to improve shock absorption. There’s also a new high-elastic adhesive that binds the OLED layers and, as per Samsung, offers four times the recovery performance compared to previous materials. Moreover, a high-strength titanium plate backs the screen. With all this, and the lab results previously provided by Samsung, we feel the Fold 7 should survive the YouTuber’s test.
However, since the fold test is being done manually and not in controlled lab conditions, it should give us a more realistic idea of how repeated folding affects the device in everyday use.
If you’re curious, you can still catch the livestream and see how the phone performs in real time.
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