Zack Nelson of the popular YouTube channel JerryRigEverything has just announced his least — and most — durable phones of 2024.
Now, as anyone who’s watched his videos will know, Nelson knows a thing or two about phone durability. Over many years, in the name of research, he’s scratched, scraped, burned, and bent a slew of new smartphones to see how they fare. And, usually, the result is not pretty.
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Speaking at a table full of phones and tablets wrecked by Nelson over the last 12 months, the tech YouTuber reaches for the triple-folding Huawei Mate XT as his least durable handset of 2024. He chose it because “not only does it have the super-soft center screen, but that center screen is exposed to the outside world when it’s closed. It also sucks up rocks and dust like a hoover, but that screen, which we already know scratches [easily], is like walking around with a raw egg in your pocket.” He acknowledged that the handset’s design is “super cool” but added that it’s most definitely not “super durable.”
In the original video featuring the Mate XT’s bend test, Nelson notes how the phone actually includes sensors that vibrate to notify you if you’re bending any of the three folds in the wrong direction. “This is the first phone to beg for its life during the bend test,” Nelson quipped just before snapping the far left display with a wince-inducing crack.
As for the most durable smartphone of 2024, well, that went to the extraordinarily rugged Armor 24, which Nelson suggested “has enough built-in protection to survive a steamroller.” The Armor 24 is like a brick, and so there was zero possibility of Nelson snapping this thing in two. To find out which two phones he selected as runners-up in the most-durable category, and which handsets won out in the most/least repairable category, check out Nelson’s video at the top of this page.
