When JerryRigEverything takes to a phone for durability you know it’s going to have a bad day. The OnePlus 10 Pro had a particularly bad day suffering a catastrophic failure during the durability test, ultimately snapping in half. While these videos take the phones well beyond realistic daily use scenarios, accidents do happen…
In the video, you can see the OnePlus 10 Pro stands up well to scratch tests and (without IP rating) will stand up to some water contact. Unfortunately though, once the bend tests came into play, it was a different story. As a user, it is concerning to see a phone crack easily under the pressure from human hands (7 mins into the video) vs machines. In one direction the frosted glass cracks relatively easily under the camera.
Once the phone is bent in the other direction, folding the screen onto itself, failure occurs. Because of the “unplanned disassembly” of the device, the teardown is included by Zach Nelson in this video. It shows some concerns with construction, but also notes that a decent case can protect your devices from accidents.
How do bend tests affect your buying decisions with phones?
Phones failing to survive bending by hand should be prohibited from sale in Australia.
It’s bad enough that a phone easily gets bended out of shape and broken, simply from being in a back pocket, and the user/wearer simply sitting down.
A phone that can’t cope with any bending from the user holding and bending the phone, that’s manufacturer level defective design. Too damned thin and weak, to survive normal minor mistreatment.