Samsung Forces iFixit to Pull Galaxy Fold Teardown

Samsung really doesn’t want you to know that the Galaxy Fold is a badly designed product. Two days after iFixit posted the results of a teardown in which they referred to the Galaxy Fold as both “alarmingly fragile” and “overwhelmingly fragile,” the Korean company intervened to get the article removed by pressuring the partner that provided iFixit with a device in the first place.

iFixit hasn’t entirely folded on the topic. The organization notes that its analysis “supported suspicions” that the device doesn’t properly or sufficiently protect its screen and that it removed its review to protect a relationship with its supplier, as opposed to due to legal action. But that distinction is less important than what the repair organization found.

What iFixit found, in aggregate, is that there are enormous physical gaps in the Galaxy Fold design that permit dirt and dust direct entry into the phone. This was exacerbated by Samsung’s decision to leave entry gaps that allow material directly behind the incredibly fragile OLED screen, creating a direct and obvious opportunity to destroy it. Closing the phone protected the gap that allowed this to occur, but opens new gaps on both sides of the phone. As iFixit wrote:

These gaps are less likely to cause immediate screen damage, but will definitely attract dirt. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a phone with this many gaps, with the industry trending away from moving parts and towards sealed slabs.

This Is a Product Samsung Intended to Launch

Is it fair to be having this sort of conversation about the Galaxy Fold? Yes. This is a product that was headed directly to consumers before Samsung had a sudden outbreak of sanity and pulled it. This is a piece of hardware that had been through the company’s full internal review process. It had passed whatever internal checks Samsung has in place. This is the phone Samsung was going to ship.

What Samsung doesn’t want talked about is how self-evidently flawed that process is. I don’t know who intervened to kill the launch at the last second, but this is not a product that should have ever been prepped for market. The most likely conclusion is that the company panicked after its technology was stolen and rivals like Huawei were expected to introduce their own hardware.

Everything about the debut, from the state of the hardware to the screen protector Samsung forgot to tell reviewers not to remove, speaks to it. One of the potential flaws iFixit noted and raised was that the screen protector, which Samsung says is absolutely essential to the phone, isn’t even secured behind the bezels that protect the rest of the device. Instead, it sits on top, just like the standard bit of protective film that you always peel off when you buy something with a screen.

iFixit wrote that anyone who bought a Galaxy Fold would “almost certainly” be replacing the entire display before long because of a combination of fragility and bad design. This phone wasn’t ready to launch. Samsung was on the verge of launching it anyway. And you, as potential buyers, deserve to know that.

iFixit’s report is down, but our summary of it, with some additional quotations, is not. Feel free to investigate. And don’t plan to buy a Galaxy Fold until Samsung demonstrates that it’s redesigned the device.

Note: This post brought to you by the letters STR, EIS, AND, and the word “Effect.” Feature image by Wikipedia.

Top image credit: California Coastal Records Project/CC BY-SA 3.0

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