The first deflating report of Pixel Fold screen failure is pretty rough

No hardware launch is ever going to go off without a hitch. With the early “reviews” (reviewing a device as complex as the Pixel Fold in a week feels like a stretch to me) and hands-on videos out on the internet for the Pixel Fold as of yesterday, it seems the reviewer crowd is mostly positive when it comes to Google’s first folding devices.

It’s not without flaws, sure, and I actually resonate with many of the negative aspects brought up in those videos and posts after using the phone for a little over a week now. But the Pixel Fold is much different than just another phone, and both the excitement and irritations with the device need a bit more than a week to form into usable opinions. At least in my case, they do.

Hardware failure isn’t an opinion

That being said, most of us who have hands-on with this device right now can agree that the hardware feels absolutely top-notch, refined, and fantastic in the hand. And until yesterday, I would have at least said that it feels like Google might have avoided the obvious hardware pitfall that comes with a bending display. But I would’ve spoken too soon.

Yesterday right after lunch, a noted tech reviewer – Ron Amadeo over at Ars Technica – reported that his Pixel Fold lasted a whopping 4 days before the screen went out on him. And this isn’t a small screen-related issue: the phone is basically a brick at this point.

While it might be tempting to think that Ron was running around willy-nilly with the Pixel Fold and damaged it, that is actually the exact opposite of what he describes. In his post, Ron explains that the use of this phone was far below what would even constitute normal, everyday wear and tear:

I didn’t do anything to deserve this. The phone sat on my desk while I wrote about it, and I would occasionally stop to poke the screen, take a screenshot, or open and close it. It was never dropped or exposed to a significant amount of grit, nor had it gone through the years of normal wear and tear that phones are expected to survive. This was the lightest possible usage of a phone, and it still broke.

via Ars Technica

The probable cause of the damage

He goes on to explain that the likely culprit is a tiny, nearly imperceptible gap between the screen’s outer layer and the actual bezel. I didn’t even notice this until running my thumbnail to the edge of the display, but his point makes a lot of sense. Though it is the tiniest of gaps, it is a spot where the less-than-resilient OLED screen is exposed, and that means a small bit of debris can wreak havoc.

This plastic layer is critical to the OLED’s survival, but it doesn’t stretch to the edges. Every company that builds these screens leaves a margin around the perimeter of the display where there is no plastic layer, just a raw, exposed OLED panel peeking out into the world. We would normally expect a foldable to break along the crease, where the screen sees the most stress. But mine died due to this exposed OLED gap.

The tiniest bit of something got in there, and when I closed the display, the pressure of the other display side was enough to puncture the OLED panel. It didn’t see or feel anything when closing the device, but the display pixels started freaking out. After going over the device with a magnifying glass, I think I found where the puncture was.

via Ars Technica

A stark warning for buyers

So what does all of this mean? In the end, I think it is a warning call to potential buyers of the Pixel Fold. At $1800, it is a very expensive phone; and while a high price means you usually nitpick hardware or software imperfections that don’t meet your now-lofty expectations after spending so much money, the reality now is that you also may have to be wary of what you might inadvertently do to make the screen hardware fail completely. And at the end of the day, you simply shouldn’t have to worry about a device you’ll carry with you everywhere breaking completely when you’ve been careful with it.

We’ve seen this before with folding phones and the story here is no different; only this time it will be very interesting to see how often this happens outside of this one case. On one hand, this could be a one-off thing that unfortunately happened to someone with an audience to hear about it. On the other, it could be indicative of a hardware defect that Google somehow missed in the long development period for this phone.

Either way, it’s tough news for a phone that is just now beginning to ship out to future users. I’m really hopeful that Google has their ducks in a row with customer service for this device. Their history with retail support and repairs isn’t good, but on a device this expensive, they simply cannot afford to give consumers the run-around when repairs are warranted.

And if this problem starts popping up here and there, the fear factor around spending this sort of cash for a phone that simply must work under normal circumstances may prove too great for the Pixel Fold to recover from. I sincerely hope that isn’t the case, but I’m also realistic enough about this stuff to realize that this is a critical inflection point in the Pixel Fold story moving forward. And we won’t know how it plays out until more units are in the hands of real users. Here’s hoping things go well.