The potential cause of the screen damage
According to the report, there’s a very likely cause for this swift death of the Pixel Fold display, and it points to a design flaw that could drastically affect the resilience of Google’s Pixel Fold, reminiscent a little of Samsung’s swiftly retired first Galaxy Fold from Spring 2019 remind.
Accordingly, the plastic layer over the flexible AMOLED with Ultra Thin Glass (UTG) does not reach all the way to the thick edge of the Pixel Fold. What is left instead is a gap of bare OLED material where small dust particles can get trapped (see image below). If you close the foldable, this potentially leads to damage to the display at this very gap, especially due to the almost flat edges, which allow the display halves to come dangerously close when folding.
According to the tester’s measurements, the rather thick edge of the Pixel Fold is only 0.3 mm higher than that of the Oppo Find N2 by around 0.8 mm. This apparently means that the AMOLED panel is exposed to constant danger when folding it in everyday life if tiny particles get caught in the gap between the edge and the end of the plastic layer. It remains to be seen whether the tester’s diagnosis is correct. Google has not yet commented on the serious allegation, and we are not aware of any other damaged Pixel Fold models.