Apple has been criticized for not having a foldable iPhone. Samsung mocked Apple fans who are sitting on the fence and missing out on owning a next-gen "foldable phone."

Yet Apple is being cautious about this segment for the time being as there are still issues to be ironed out. In some cases, Big Issues.

A case in point: Ron Amadeo, writer for Ars Technica, owned the new Pixel Fold from Google. It died four days later. Ron describes that his phone sat on his desk while he wrote about it, and he occasionally stopped to touch the screen to surf the web, take a screenshot, or open and close it. It was never dropped or exposed to a significant amount of grit, nor had it gone through the years of normal wear and tear that phones are expected to survive. This was the lightest possible usage of a phone, and it still broke.

The flexible OLED screen died after four days. The bottom 10 pixels of the Pixel Fold went dead first, forming a white line of 100 percent brightness pixels that blazed across the bottom of the screen. The entire left half of the foldable display stopped responding to touch, too, and an hour later, a white gradient started growing upward across the display.

(Click on image to Greatly Enlarge)

Ron describes the issue with his Pixel Fold's display at length. At one point he notes: "The exposed strip of the OLED panel is sandwiched between the edge of the screen protector and the raised bezel surrounding the phone. So even if you take care to wipe the display off, that exposed OLED perimeter acts as a gutter for any debris that lands on the phone. Even as I look at the dead, flickering foldable now, it's easy to spot lint and other junk trying to accumulate in the OLED death zone. That appears to be what killed the phone, as I can see a near-microscopic nick mark near where the display first started having problems."

Manufacturers keep wanting to brush off the significant durability issues of flexible OLED displays, thinking that if they just shove the devices onto the market, everything will work out. That hasn't been the case, though, and any time you see a foldable phone for sale, you don't have to look far to see reports of dead displays. I'm sure we'll see several reports of broken Pixel Folds once the unit hits the general public.

Corning may save us with an exterior foldable glass cover, but until then, buying any foldable feels like a gamble.

The scary part for Google customers is that a broken Pixel Fold means dealing with the company's notoriously unhelpful support team. Horror stories are a regular occurrence on the /r/GooglePixel subreddit, where users have called Google Support "hilariously incompetent" and a "nightmare" to deal with, begging the company to improve. It's one thing to ship normal glass smartphones, but these fragile foldables will put more stress on Google's support network.

For more on this, read the full Ars Technica report.

Being first to market doesn't always pan out. In fact, most of the time, early adopters pay a very heavy price with new devices having flaws galore. I'm sure Google will go on the offence in the coming days to downplay Ron's experience and ensure potential customers this is not an issue. So we thank Ron for writing about his Pixel Fold nightmare experience exposing this issue that Google other OEMs are trying to downplay or being silent about.  

On the flipside, Engadget reviewed the Pixel Fold today without mentioning the display's possible failure issue.