Samsung Galaxy Fold Reviewers Are Noticing Screen Problems After Days of Use ⇥ theverge.com

Dieter Bohn, the Verge:

Look closely at the picture above, and you can see a small bulge right on the crease of my Galaxy Fold review unit. It’s just enough to slightly distort the screen, and I can feel it under my finger. There’s something pressing up against the screen at the hinge, right there in the crease. My best guess is that it’s a piece of debris, something harder than lint for sure. It’s possible that it’s something else, though, like the hinge itself on a defective unit pressing up on the screen.

It’s a distressing thing to discover just two days after receiving my review unit. More distressing is that the bulge eventually pressed sharply enough into the screen to break it. You can see the telltale lines of a broken OLED converging on the spot where the bulge is.

Bohn isn’t the only one with problems: Steve Kovach of CNBC, Mark Gurman, and Marques Brownlee all report broken screens on their review units, which they were provided with earlier this week. It appears that Gurman and Brownlee peeled off a protective layer. It looks kind of like that plastic film that all new devices ship with to protect them in transit, but this one is apparently supposed to stay on the screen.

Samsung said a couple of weeks ago that they tested the Galaxy Fold extensively, but this is not a problem that should occur with a two thousand dollar smartphone that will, apparently, be shipping to customers next week. The Galaxy Fold is still a prototype.

Update: Samsung has given a statement to the Verge emphasizing that users should not remove the film that looks like it can and should be removed from the screen. Some people have said that there’s a note that comes with the device indicating that this film should not be peeled off, but Mark Gurman says that some review devices did not have this notice. Also, according to Joanna Stern, Samsung is not delaying the device’s launch despite the issues reported with devices in the first few days of use. I do not think this will go well.