Google Pixel Fold’s hinge is a far cry from “the most durable”

Google's marketing material for its first foldable phone, the Pixel Fold, shows a lot of confidence in the device's ability and durability. The company goes as far as to claim that the Pixel Fold has “the most durable hinge on a foldable,” but an independent test suggests that these bold claims might be unfounded and inaccurate.

The Pixel Fold was recently featured in a video by YouTuber JerryRigEverything, and interestingly enough, results from JRE's stress test really call Google's claims into question. Simply put, the phone couldn't survive when flipped backward. The hinge, along with the phone's frame and the foldable display, broke apart, rendering the entire phone unusable.

Google claims that the Pixel Fold has “the most durable hinge on a foldable.” But that's a far cry from what we see in the durability test above. At the very least, the Pixel Fold hinge fails where the Galaxy Z Fold 4 hinge does not. Even the original Galaxy Fold performed better.

Google is too confident in its durability claims

As you may have noticed in the screenshot above, Google's bold statement about its Pixel Fold's hinge durability is accompanied by an annotation. Even so, the fine print doesn't help the phone's case.

Google clarifies at the bottom of its product page that the Pixel Fold has “the most durable hinge on a foldable – among foldable phones in markets where Pixel Fold is sold. Based on durability testing conducted by Google LLC. Testing includes folding and 1-meter tumble/drop tests using competitor and pre-production Pixel Fold phones. Pixel Fold is not drop proof.”

Needless to say, Samsung sells the Galaxy Z Fold 4 in markets where the Pixel Fold is available, including the USA. So, technically speaking, Google says that the Pixel Fold's hinge is more durable than the Galaxy Z Fold 4's. Exactly how Google reached this conclusion is unclear, but it goes to show that the company's internal testing method might be heavily biased toward its Pixel device.

Granted, JerryRigEverything puts mobile devices to extreme durability tests, likely more so than Google ever did for its Pixel Fold. Nevertheless, breaking the hinge and frame by bending the phone backward didn't require a lot of force, which is a bit worrying. And once again, it's worth reminding that the Galaxy Z Fold 4 survived the same stress test unscathed.

As a matter of fact, the original Galaxy Fold released in 2019 couldn't be bent backward. The hinge and the phone survived where the Pixel Fold, released four years later, fell apart.