Samsung's folding phone, which will ding buyers about two grand after tax, is already in deep trouble: the review units sent to journalists are dying after hours of use.
CNBC's Todd Haselton writes that it was "a tantalizing glimpse of the future — before it broke."
During my second day of testing, the screen began flickering and would turn off and on at a rapid pace. It became completely unusable and at times wouldn’t turn on at all.
Samsung had said not to remove a thin layer that sits on top of the screen. Other reviewers accidentally removed this layer and ran into similar issues that I saw. But I never removed the protective film or used the device outside any way a normal user might.
The Verge titled its video review "after the break" and awarded it the not-so coveted "Yikes" rating.
Whatever happened, it certainly wasn’t because I have treated this phone badly. I’ve done normal phone stuff, like opening and closing the hinge and putting it in my pocket. We did stick a tiny piece of molding clay on the back of the phone yesterday to prop it up for a video shoot, which is something we do in every phone video shoot. So perhaps a tiny piece of that snuck into a gap on the back of the hinge and then around or through its cogs until it lodged in between the screen and the hinge. It’d be sort of like Charlie Chaplin getting caught in the gears in Modern Times.
Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal writes that "we are not beta testers".
If you peel off the folding screen’s plastic coating—which looks like a regular stick-on screen protector—you could cause irreparable damage.
Steve Kovach, another reporter at CNBC:
After one day of use… pic.twitter.com/VjDlJI45C9
— Steve Kovach (@stevekovach) April 17, 2019
Lemon.
