OnePlus Open touted as good for 1,000,000-fold lifetime with new Flexion Hinge
Not only is OnePlus a premium foldable smartphone brand now, it is also already baiting its new rivals with bold claims of an Open that epitomizes the new tag-line "Light Makes Might".
The OEM has unveiled the new Find N3 variant as having a new "Ultra-Efficient" Flexion hinge. Its 69 components include a "single-piece spine" made of an zirconium amorphous alloy, further "reinforced" with a "titanium & cobalt-molybdenum alloy" that is apparently "stronger than stainless steel".
It is joined by with a "patented H-pattern micro-weave" of carbon fiber underlay for the Open's new main display. This build using these materials have helped the OnePlus Open secure TÜV Rheinland's Reliable Folding certification as well as an official IPX4 rating, due to its ability to withstand a reported 1,000,000 folds at once, equivalent to about 10 years of use.
Of course, those claims also leave the new OnePlus device Open to all durability/teardown vloggers who are probably primed and ready to test its new claims at this point.
It seems ready for these trials on paper - nevertheless, its fancy new hinge has also been found not to be able to hold angles of ~160° so far, whereas MKBHD has already linked it to a line of dead pixels that have already set in on a test unit. Stay tuned for our hands-on and full review to see if things get more robust for the inaugural OnePlus foldable.
The OnePlus Open: already available to pre-order on Amazon