CNET's torture test of the Motorola Razr was flawed

Shawn Knight

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Staff member
A hot potato: Motorola is standing by the durability of its newly minted Razr foldable smartphone after a questionable torture test from CNET cast it in an unfavorable light. But was this really a fair analysis?

The publication recently strapped a retail version of the Motorola Razr to a mechanical test device called the FoldBot. This robot, borrowed from the folks at warranty service provider SquareTrade, was designed specifically to simulate the opening and closing of the hinge on the Samsung Galaxy, not the Moto Razr. CNET admitted as much in its test yet still, decided to forge ahead.

The plan was to livestream the entire testing process, all 12+ hours and 100,000 folds. Unfortunately, the Razr barely made it a quarter of the way through the torture test before the hinge mechanism failed.

But was this test really fair? Motorola doesn’t think so, and neither do I.

In a statement issued to Engadget and other publications, a Motorola spokesperson said SquareTrade’s FoldBot is simply not designed to test their device. “Therefore, any tests run utilizing this machine will put undue stress on the hinge and not allow the phone to open and close as intended, making the test inaccurate,” the spokesperson added. And they are right.

This is just my own theory, but it seems to be backed up by Motorola’s test footage. When you open and close the company’s clamshell, it needs a tiny bit of room for the two slabs to move, similar to how the screen ever-so-slightly tucks into the chin when you close it.

It appears as though the FoldBot doesn’t permit adequate movement, instead moving the slabs along a fixed path with each open and close. This restriction could have easily contributed to why the hinge failed so quickly.

Notice in Motorola’s test footage how the robot opens and closes the lid without putting any restriction on its movement. One arm simply flips the lid open while a separate arm closes it, just as a user would. Rinse and repeat. It’s much more indicative of real-world usage.

Anyway, back to the evidence. The video you likely saw is titled, “See the moment Moto’s Razr stops after 27,000 folds” but even that is misleading as the clip starts with the phone already out of the machine and making some horrendous noises. To see the actual moment it became apparent that something was wrong, you have to watch the livestreamed video.

At around the 3:35:11 mark, CNET’s Chris Parker gets on the mic for the four-hour check-in. At roughly 3:35:50, right before the FoldBot’s counter passes 27,200 folds, something happens and the machine stops being able to fully fold the phone. Parker recognizes this and powers down the machine at 3:35:59. He proceeds to take the Razr off the machine, folds it manually several times and even powers it on to make sure it works. It creaks a little – maybe more so than earlier on – but all seems well otherwise, so they continue on.

At 3:39:47, Parker attempts to load the phone back into the torture machine but struggles to get it aligned properly. At 3:41:34, he turns the machine back on but it is unable to cycle properly as the phone isn’t correctly aligned. The phone’s position is adjusted multiple times and the machine is even put into full speed, but alas, it can’t fold it.

Inexplicably, Parker even takes the Razr out and inserts it backwards into the FoldBot, at 3:45:40. No luck.

After more adjustments, it comes back out at 3:47:54. The FoldBot is then turned on to make sure it is working (it is) and during this time, Parker manually folds the Razr, starting at 3:48:05, several more times – seemingly without incident – before sensing that something may be wrong seconds later, at 3:48:12.

So what are the takeaways here? Well for one, CNET’s test wasn’t very professional. They used a testing robot that was designed for a different phone, albeit with modifications to accommodate the Razr. The rig is also designed in a manner that if the Razr isn’t positioned perfectly, the bot can’t complete a cycle, likely putting unjust stress on the hinge. This is evident from the very beginning, 17:37, as the phone is misaligned and has to be repositioned.

What’s more, the bot doesn’t open and close fully as it does in Motorola’s testing video. I don’t know if that is good or bad, but it is worth pointing out.

Another observation is the fact that the bot seems to be doing a much better job early on in the testing, say around the 22-minute mark. If you skip ahead to, say 30:18 in the YouTube video, it appears as if the bot isn’t folding completely on every cycle. You can try setting YouTube’s playback speed to 0.25x to see this better.

The team noticed this at around 33:30 and made some adjustments, but was the damage already done?

Despite the trial-and-error, the fold counter kept climbing. The publication acknowledged that the counter wasn’t entirely accurate, but again, it’s something worth noting for those that didn’t watch the entire four-hour video.

Another concern is that CNET took the phone off the bot – and reinserted it – multiple times during the course of testing and struggled to get it aligned properly each time. Again, this is more unjust stress on the hinge mechanism.

Yet another thing worth mentioning is the cycle speed. CNET said that at full tilt, the bot opens and closes the phone 2.5 times per second. This isn’t representative of actual use and the constant cycling could have created excess heat within the hinge that would not be experienced during normal use.

CNET published a video on Saturday morning titled, “See what went wrong in our Moto Razr fold test,” but even this is edited in a way that doesn’t illustrate what truly transpired.

Parker did say, however, that, “to say this phone is broken at this point is a little bit of an overstatement but it certainly isn’t working the way it was designed to work.”

Masthead credit: Moto Razr by MonicaZ82

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So, a "torture" test, which might SIMULATE how ldiot consumers actually will treat the phone, as opposed to a "controlled" test? You know this thing will get dropped, dirty, tossed, bounced and all sorts of things. If you are silly enough to spend THAT amount of money on "a phone" it flipping better stand up to the punishment!
 
So, a "torture" test, which might SIMULATE how ldiot consumers actually will treat the phone, as opposed to a "controlled" test? You know this thing will get dropped, dirty, tossed, bounced and all sorts of things. If you are silly enough to spend THAT amount of money on "a phone" it flipping better stand up to the punishment!

This made me laugh. Thank you.
 
How is folding it 2.5 times per second representative. Speaking as an engineer, there will be a build up of heat and stress that will make it fail faster than any human could manage.

This test seems to have been done for clicks rather than actually testing the device.
 
So, a "torture" test, which might SIMULATE how ldiot consumers actually will treat the phone, as opposed to a "controlled" test? You know this thing will get dropped, dirty, tossed, bounced and all sorts of things. If you are silly enough to spend THAT amount of money on "a phone" it flipping better stand up to the punishment!
Did you read the part where the testing mechanism was not for this phone? Or do you not understand why that's an issue? It's not trying to be a controlled test, it is simply pulling the phone out of it's hinges like if you had two gears unallinged. It is not true to the real world and so it's pointless.

And I don't know why you think that the phone is gonna get bounced, dirty and thrown like it's a ball. Maybe that's how you handle your phone but others don't.
 
Glass don't fold...
The screen isn't made of glass (it's plastic) and the screen doesn't fail its the hinge that goes, otherwise good point. I do agree this mechanism of forcing the phone to fold in a clamp just looks wrong - I guess we will find out in a year or two when the fuss has died down if non-click-bait videos of normal people using these normally start to fail.
 
I thought the opposite I must say. In the real world devices are subject to far more punishment than this test does. What happens if a bit of sand or grease gets into the mechanism? I don’t treat my phone like an ***** but I do travel a lot and recently to the dessert!

Still hats off to the people who are going to sink a lot of cash into one of these new folding devices and effectively be beta testers. In a few years their sacrifices will pay off for me when I buy a refined version of a folding device.
 
I prefer one slate of glass in a thin case like iPhone or Pixel then plastic layer in a sandwich making the phone square and inevitably more bulky not to mention more prone to damage of the delicate surface which in best case scenario will lower its resale price which for a lot of people is very important factor when considering a phone. That alone is one of the reasons why ppl buy Apple devices as they know 1-2 years later they can still get a pretty penny towards an upgrade. But personal preferences aside whenever you have moving parts you introduce more possible points of failures. HDDs are best example here and this is one of biggest selling points of SDD drives (among other more obvious ones) so going back to hinge mechanism is by definition a step backwards on many levels. Just saying.. ;-)
 
I thought the opposite I must say. In the real world devices are subject to far more punishment than this test does. What happens if a bit of sand or grease gets into the mechanism? I don’t treat my phone like an ***** but I do travel a lot and recently to the dessert!

So you're saying someone is going to firmly hold both ends of this phone and open and close it in anger? Nope, you're saying it's going to be worse. Got it. This CNET test is nothing but a torture test of the hinge. That machine does not represent on how this phone will be opened and close during normal use. Unless you give it to a toddler, it will not. The machine didn't even open and close it all the way.

You do bring up a good point on the sand however. But it doesn't quite relate to what's going on here and how the test was done, whether you agree with it or not.
 
Did you read the part where the testing mechanism was not for this phone? Or do you not understand why that's an issue? It's not trying to be a controlled test, it is simply pulling the phone out of it's hinges like if you had two gears unallinged. It is not true to the real world and so it's pointless.

And I don't know why you think that the phone is gonna get bounced, dirty and thrown like it's a ball. Maybe that's how you handle your phone but others don't.

Have you seen photos of the damage that phones take on a daily basis?
Sit on, bent, slammed, dropped...I'm not saying people do it on purpose, but with the syndrome PIH, it happens. (phone in hand...people keep them in their hands all the time).
 
This is exactly what I said in my comments in the original article yesterday...

Shawn: I was wondering why you went through so much details on this article....The *****s at Cnet are not worth it for such details...!
 
I don't know how the general public handles expensive hardware but I usually do so with care.

I've yet to accidentally break something in the price range we're talking here...
 
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