Three weeks ago, we put Apple’s new iPhone Duo on our custom foldable phone testing platform, the Fold-a-Phone, to find out how many times it could bend until it broke. It’s not completely broken yet, but the hinge has started to break. I initially detected some looseness in the hinge movement yesterday during our afternoon livestream. It became apparent that the iPhone Duo wasn’t opening with the same firm sound I was used to hearing. When I left the office last night at 6pm, it was still fully open. Now, however, the screen no longer opens completely. Instead, it unfolds most of it but leaves a few degrees of angle at the hinge. Watch the video above to see for yourself. After examining the sensor data we have collected and the photos and videos we constantly took during the testing process, we determined that changes in opening force and movement began to occur around the 390,000-fold point on Tuesday afternoon and gradually increased until last night. The cable we used to open the phone’s screen would be removed before the screen was in the fully open position, but would then “slide” the rest of the way down. But between 12:30 and 1 am this morning, around 440,300 folds, the screen would no longer have time to fully open before Folda-Phone would make it close again. Another view of the not-quite-flat state of the iPhone Duo in the Fold-a-Phone machine. It can still be folded by hand. Matthew Murray/CNET How serious is this problem? In the grand scheme of things, not much. The phone continues to work and maintains other screen positions without problems. There are no cracks, signs of a more visible crease or other flaws. This issue is not sufficient to meet our stated failure conditions on the Duo, which include power loss, sensors not detecting the screen where it should be within the given time period, and screen blackout. The phone is only 5 to 10 degrees away from the fully open state, and can still be moved the rest of the way by hand (although without the distinctive sound and feel it had before). Join CNET’s iPhone Duo livestream on YouTube Monday through Friday from 1pm to 5pm ET, where you can follow along live and see how the Folda-Phone does its thing to a Duo. Chances are, if you had purchased the phone and encountered this behavior, you might not have even noticed it at first. And remember, when this started, we had subjected the iPhone Duo to the equivalent of almost 12 and a half years of folding (assuming 100 folds per day), well beyond the number of folds we would expect from even an avid user. Apple has not publicly stated the expected number of folds that the iPhone Duo would support, so we have been left to speculate. Guesses within CNET have ranged from 500,000 (which matches Samsung’s rating for the Galaxy Z Fold 8) to 1.5 million. But even if we still don’t know for sure how much worse the hinge action will get and therefore what the final figure will be, what we have seen today represents the first significant step towards failure. Let’s move on. And we hope you’ll stick with us, both here and on our daily livestreams, to see what else develops. Matthew Murray Lab Director As CNET Group Lab Director, Matthew leads the Labs team, which helps coordinate and conduct product testing for CNET and other Ziff Davis publishing brands, including PCMag and ZDNET. He previously spent eight years as head of testing at Future plc, and before that, eight years as an analyst and writer at PCMag. His technology writing has also appeared in publications such as Computer Shopper, ExtremeTech, Tom’s Guide, Laptop, and Backstage. See full biography
