Inside the lab where Samsung torture tests its new, foldable Galaxy Z Fold5 and Z Flip5

Samsung debuted its newest foldable phones during a massive event in Seoul, South Korea, on Wednesday. The announcement, which included appearances by Sydney Sweeney and BTS member Suga, seems to mark a shift in Samsung’s broader mobile strategy, with foldables like the Galaxy Z Fold5 and Galaxy Z Flip5 sitting at center stage.

Ahead of the show, I toured Samsung’s research and development facilities in Suwon, South Korea, to get a look at how the company torture tests its latest devices.

Roughly 19 miles outside of Seoul, Suwon is home to Samsung’s enormous Digital City campus. Amid a collection of four glass towers and a handful of smaller buildings is Samsung’s quality assurance facility, where automated machines slam, bash, freeze, drown, and otherwise work over its devices like mechanical prize fighters.

During my time at the lab, at which Samsung, unfortunately, didn’t allow me to photograph, I watched as the smartphone maker put the Z Fold5 and Z Flip5 through its paces. And with the Flip 5 starting at $999 and the Fold 5 starting at $1,799, making sure its phones don’t fail the first time you haphazardly toss them on your desk or drop them while fumbling for your keys is imperative to Samsung’s foldable future.

In one room, a number of machines tumbled and rolled the Fold5 and Flip5 to determine how they withstand being dropped at different angles. Nearby, a series of machines lifted and released the phones from a few inches off of a platform to simulate lightly tossing them onto a desk or table.

Around the corner, another line of machines dropped the Fold5 and Flip5 onto different surfaces to see how they responded to certain types of shock. The phones are then examined and, if there are issues, the company takes note to improve upon them in the future.

The idea is that while those kinds of impacts might seem small at first, the cumulative result of such bumps could result in more serious damage over the phones’ lifetimes.

Down the hall, a group of sealed boxes with mechanical arms repeatedly opened and closed the Fold5 and Flip5 to ensure the phones’ displays can tolerate the rigors of years of everyday use. One machine showed the phones will eventually go through 20,000 such cycles.

Modern smartphones also need to be able to survive getting wet. To that end, Samsung essentially sprays the Fold5 and Flip5 with a hose, as well as a series of fine jets of water, to prove the phone can weather a good soaking. And, in case you end up taking an unexpected dip, the company drops the phones into 5 feet of water for up to 30 minutes.

One of the more impressive testing areas included seeing how the Fold5 and Flip5 react to extreme heat and humidity and cold. Large boxes heated up the phones to 122 degrees Fahrenheit with 98% humidity, while another cooled them down to -4 degrees Fahrenheit. The company also ran opening and closing tests in similarly hot and cold temperatures.

While Samsung’s quality assurance lab is impressive, and shows that its phones are certainly durable under the right circumstances, real-world damage is far different. A quick tour of Reddit’s Samsung forums shows that people find plenty of ways to break, crush, and mash their phones, and will likely do so with the Fold5 and Flip5.

But if the company can continue to protect against those spills and smacks, its foldable line could have a long future ahead of it.

Daniel Howley is the tech editor at Yahoo Finance. He's been covering the tech industry since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @DanielHowley.

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