Much like Apple’s once vaunted super-slim butterfly keyboard, today’s range of portable devices featuring flexible OLED displays – which can fold said display into a much smaller form factor – are a marvel of engineering.
Unfortunately engineering can only do so much against fundamental flaws. In the case of both these flexible OLEDs and butterfly keyboards the main issue is that of dust intrusion, with a recent teardown by [iFixit] going over the reasons for this.
As test subject we got a Galaxy Z Fold 8, as an example of a modern-day foldable smartphone-tablet hybrid. This phone has an IP48 rating, meaning that it’s water-resistant, but not dust-resistant for particles smaller than 1 mm. To test this, [iFixit] used UV-reactive dust particles, making sure that they got literally everywhere inside the phone’s hinge mechanism.
After this treatment, trying to fold the phone caused the hinge mechanism to make absolutely horrific crunching noises, confirming that it’s reached dust-under-butterfly-keycap levels of unusable. During the subsequent teardown a quick pass with the UV lamp showed that not much of the dust had penetrated into the two halves of the device at least, but the hinge mechanism wasn’t as lucky.
Getting to the hinge is sadly rather destructive, as it involves removing the flexible OLED. Once the hinge was exposed and subjected to UV light the spectacle was something to marvel at, as can be seen in the above screenshot. With the dust caking literally every part of the mechanism, it was little wonder that the hinge had ceased to work.
Although this was obviously an extreme case of dust exposure, and the average flexible OLED screen’s hinge won’t see nearly as much dust, one can’t help but feel slightly disconcerted at that crunching noise, knowing that it’s just one big dust exposure away.
Well, I guess we know what will happen to your folding phone if it ever gets into a serious UV dust storm, otherwise I’m not sure this proves anything.
Are your pockets completely clean? Otherwise it proves that over time your $2000 folding phone will get more and more dust in it leading to failure.
C’mon its not that hard to apply logic.
Lots of people work in locations that have a lot of dust.
When the motorola clam phone came out a buddy of mine had to keep his in a zip lock bag because he was welding all day long and the magnets in the phone clasp attracted all the grinder dust in seconds.
Yes because only UV dust will penetrate your hinge…regular dust does nothing at all
Life must be hard when you read a whole article and it blows right over your head and all you got from it was “UV dust”
I’ve yet to find a foldable display that didn’t make me cringe.
There’s just too much to go wrong… kinda wish we instead would just use the tech to make wrap-around displays, fake-CRTs for that glass curve or rollable displays instead of folding… the hinge is just too much; y’know?
also the creases on them are genuinely disgusting. folding phone owners insist you barely notice them but the way they talk about it always sounds like buyer’s remorse.
Agreed. I would have been tempted to title this article “Dust And The Bane Of Foldable OLED Displays”… ;-}
“the average flexible OLED screen’s hinge won’t see nearly as much dust”
Except you go on a playground, or the beach, with your kid.
Or if you’re just a dusty kind of guy, like me
I recommend avoiding taking a naked phone to the beach or the playground sandbox. One of the few things that can readily scratch modern phone screens is sand.
Even if the hinge doesn’t die, a sand bath can ruin a pristine screen.
We are in a very bad spot, when it comes to smartphones in 2026.
First it was the SD card slot, then the headphone jack, then the IR blaster (I still miss this little guy, 0.1$ LED in the BoM btw), removable battery, notification LED (0.1$ LED in the BoM btw), camera shutter button, physical navigation buttons (okay I have mixed feelings about this one).
We were offered “curved screens”, because its so great to have your screen extend to the sides of your phone, which just happens to be even more susceptible to breaking when dropped, and which makes your phone even more slippery and hard to grip, causing the said more likely dropping events. Not to mention you have to use a special screen protector that uses special UV curing adhesive that has to be reapplied again, and again. It looks cool though! That’s all that matters, amirite?
Then came foldables. Because its so good to have moving parts in a device that you carry with you, and interact with all day long. And is expensive. And is damaged when you…drop it. Yeah…
My problem is not these weird and wacky experiments, but the social acceptance around them. Whenever some manufacturer launches experimental stuff like this, if the phone with it gets popular or even well known you can bet every manufacturer on the planet will force the “feature” in their own premium phones. And it doesn’t stop at that, eventually their entire lineup right from the 35$ shitbox to 999$ premium phone will have the feature. Even if its a bad idea. Tell me, what was so good about “curved” screens? They weren’t even curved, but just warped on the sides. It gave you a tiny bit more screen area. That’s it.
The part that ticks me off is the fact that people don’t stop and think “what good will that do to me?”, when they see a feature being advertised. Enough people don’t say “this is new, but I like XYZ, not ABC”. Too many people go “new thing, can’t hurt to try?”
Thanks for listening to my rant
But… see, what you aren’t understanding is that they have to make things worse while raising the price (and sometimes, artificially restricting supply) because they make more money that way. They have no choice.
I’m sure there will be no consequences for anyone from any of this. Everything will be fine.
wait, were you talking cars?
just a counterpoint, one stupid ‘progress’ i wound up tolerating
when phablets were new, i didn’t like them. i still remember shopping around for a phone that was 2.3″ wide, so i could use it one-handed. i grudgingly bought a slightly wider phone each generation, until my current one is 3″ wide. and i use it one-handed all the time.
somewhere around 2.8″ wide, i simply had to learn a different way to hold the thing, basically shifting the back of the phone one knuckle closer to my fingertips. and once i learned the new way, the big phones are as comfortable as the little phones ever were. and i hold it nearly as securely, too. it helps that they’re so thin and slippery that i gave up long ago using one without a thin tpu case. i suspect if i went back, i’d be frustrated by the tiny keyboard.
though i am still eyeballing a truly diminuitive temu ‘bezosphone’ when this one bites the dust. turns out, the other thing i’ve discovered is i don’t actually use the phone hardly at all so i kind of don’t care. i get great battery life!
I never asked for folding screen phones to start with. Cheap ones or clones, same difference.
What I’ve been (unsuccessfully) asking for is the slightly larger flip phone with three screens and normal tactile sliding keyboard. The three screens will be two MODERATELY large screens inside and one tiny screen on the outside. I also need to be only moderately thick, so average pocket can accommodate one without bulging out too much.
Things that are nice, but I can opt out – camera and weird “volume buttons” that seem to have dozens of other intended purposes I’ve never asked for. Keep few important buttons inside where they could not be accidentally pushed, and return proper functionality “opening the phone answers the call”. I’ll let geniuses figure out how to handle hands-free docked phone in a car.
Also needed, headphone jack, and decent USB, current fad of USB-C everywhere is okay, just add another USB for power-only elsewhere. Also dearly needed removable/upgradable battery, so the worn-out one can be replaced at any time.
What I also asked for is built-in tiny projector that can be activated without opening the phone. Simple things like phone lookup, etc can be handled without firing up the main screens, and now there is no shortage of standalone/offline apps that can handle simple things quite well.
Other than that, folding phones is not anything new, just mighty good refinement of the exiting technology. I also don’t see much movements/upgrades either, whatever happened to eInk used in phones? I’d want to see lighted eink screen available as an option, similarly, replaceable/upgradeable, and since I don’t want to have my cell phone as my yootoob viewer, I don’t care if it refreshes at less than 20fps.
Of course, we don’t matter, and our opinions don’t count.
i want a clock app that doesn’t take 1.5 seconds of wall time to display my alarm
Now now, keep it realistic. With all the web-frameworks, so that a toddler can “design” apps, this is asked too much.
Apps should only be allowed to be written in assembly, C or Fortran. If it doesn’t run fast on a 15 year old phone, it should be optimized until it does.
Are you willing to pay $300 for a basic clock app? Sure it will load in 20ms, have the capacity to process 50 petabytes of data generated daily from LHC research while also mining bitcoin for its creator, but it will still crash when you set alarm to 24:00.
I am perfectly fine with either Forth or Rust. There is no shortage of bare metal frameworks for both.
Web-shmeb, rendering should be kept to its bare minimum, and static pages when/if written with proper thorough thinking (as opposed to quick slapdash) render quickly. Compress them, too, and optimize for lightweight CPU uncompressing, but I never liked web as Yet Another GUI inside already existing GUI.
Most things I use could run over command-line faked ASCII GUI just mighty fine (what is it? Text UI = TUI). I don’t need animated pseudo-3D shadowing, nor I care if windows can be drag-dropped around. As a matter of fact, things like email or any of the latest messaging apps would work just fine in the DOS Norton Commander kind of ASCII windows, which doesn’t need three dozens third-party javascript libraries.
So, in short what I NEED is the modern equivalent of MS DOS box doing the cell phone functionality. That’s it. I know I can run DOSBox inside my cell phone (with limited success, tho), but I’d probably want something simpler, FORTH-based (or RUST-based, which seem to be the current fad) OS with the option of low-tech TUI.
Is that too much to ask? : { (I am gradually working through my own, mostly unrelated project that should at the end do that – TUI-based bare-metal things without reinventing the wheel anew).
If they do clamshell-style anyway, wouldn’t it be simpler to just have two panels that lie perfectly level once folded up?