It's just marketing: Along with announcing pre-orders and features for the OnePlus 7 Pro, the company also posted a video to YouTube to "prove" the durability of its pop-up selfie mechanism. However, seeing is not always believing, as we learned with the Galaxy Fold, so be careful with your new OnePlus.
One of the selling features of the OnePlus 7 Pro, which was unveiled today and launches on Friday, is its edge-to-edge display that is unhindered by a notch or hole punch for the selfie camera. Instead, OnePlus went with a 16-megapixel pop-up sensor for the front-facing lens.
A concern that one may have about such a mechanism is its durability. How many times can it be activated without failing? What would happen if I accidentally sat on it while the sensor was extended?
These are valid questions that OnePlus supposedly put to the test. The phone maker claims that the mechanism can extend and retract more than 300,000 times. That is the equivalent of using the selfie cam 150 times a day for five years. As for the lateral pressure from accidentally sitting on it --- well, see for yourself.
The pop-up lens can supposedly stand up to almost 50 pounds of force from the rear if we are to believe the video. But wait --- haven't we seen this type of "proof" before?
Oh yes. When Samsung wanted to hype the durability of the Galaxy Fold's screen by showing us robots that supposedly opened and closed the phones 200,000 times.
We saw how credible that video was when reviewers started reporting their screens breaking and having other problems after only days of use. Samsung subsequently delayed the release of the Galaxy Fold and should be announcing a new release date before the end of the month.
So to take this OnePlus video at face value and go ahead and try this experiment for yourself would likely be folly. These types of promos are filmed in highly controlled environments. That said, you probably could sit on it with the lens extended without doing any damage in most cases.