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Can a Folding Phone Bend Both Ways?! – Bend Test!

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Zack Nelson takes his screwdriver to the world’s first folding phone you can actually buy.

JerryRigEverything host Zack Nelson has built a career finding the breaking point of every new phone that hits the market, and in July 2019 he turned his attention to the Royole FlexPai — the first commercially available folding smartphone, on sale for roughly $1,500. Unlike Samsung’s delayed Galaxy Fold, which folds inward, the FlexPai wraps its flexible display around the outside of the device. Nelson’s question was simple: if you push a screen built to bend one way in the opposite direction, does it survive?

• The Royole FlexPai, unveiled in late 2018, uses an outward-folding flexible AMOLED display with a mechanical hinge, unlike the inward-folding, delayed Samsung Galaxy Fold.
• Nelson’s scratch test found the plastic-covered screen soft and vulnerable at low levels on the Mohs hardness scale.
• Under a heavy reverse-bend, the internal hinge mechanism snapped, but the flexible display kept lighting up and functioning despite the mechanical failure.

A $1,500 Screen Built to Scratch

Before Nelson ever touched the hinge, he ran his standard pick test on the FlexPai’s display. Because the panel is a flexible AMOLED covered in plastic rather than glass, it scored low on the Mohs hardness scale and picked up scratches with minimal pressure — the same soft-plastic vulnerability that dogged early reviews of Samsung’s foldable. For a device asking buyers to spend $1,500, that’s not a small mark against it.

The takeaway from that portion of the test was blunt: folding phones, at least in this first generation, trade scratch resistance for flexibility. Royole’s engineers had to use a bendable material to make the outward fold possible at all, and that material simply isn’t as tough as the Gorilla Glass on a normal slab phone.

The Reverse-Bend Test

The real question Nelson set out to answer was whether the FlexPai could bend the “wrong” way — backward, against the direction its hinge was engineered for. He applied heavy, sustained pressure in reverse, essentially trying to force the phone to fold inward instead of outward.

The hinge lock and housing gave out under that pressure, snapping rather than flexing gracefully. Mechanically, the phone failed exactly as you’d expect a device to fail when you fight its design on purpose.

Even with the hinge mechanism snapped and the housing broken, the flexible display kept lighting up and functioning.

The Panel That Wouldn’t Quit

That’s the twist Nelson highlighted as the headline result. Despite the catastrophic failure of the hinge and surrounding housing, Royole’s flexible panel itself never went dark. It kept displaying an image through the kind of abuse that would shatter a normal glass screen instantly, proving the underlying AMOLED technology is more resilient than the phone’s scratch-prone coating or its mechanical hinge.

It’s a split verdict that mirrors a lot of gear-teardown content in this space: the flashy engineering — the bendable panel itself — outperformed the boring mechanical parts holding it together. Viewers looking for more stress-test-style stunts from creators pushing products past their limits can find similar spectacle in videos like World’s Largest Challenge! or World’s Most Dangerous Escape Room!, where the appeal is the same: watching something get pushed until it breaks, and seeing exactly where the limit is.

Nelson’s conclusion left the FlexPai in an odd spot — a phone whose screen survived abuse its hinge couldn’t, on a device that beat Samsung to market but still couldn’t shake the same fragility questions dogging every folding phone in 2019. Whether Royole fixes the hinge in its next hardware revision is the thing worth watching before anyone hands over another $1,500 for round two.