A fair few phones fell into hands of tech YouTuber Zack Nelson this year, with each and every one of them subjected to his rather brutal durability test.
The multi-faceted though somewhat unscientific test that Nelson performs for his JerryRigEverything channel involves taking various hard-edged tools to the surfaces of each phone, as well as covering them in grit, and holding a naked flame to the displays. Finally, Nelson uses his bare hands and brute force to bend the phones to test their structural integrity. Some stay intact. Some crack. Some break apart.
Just recently, Nelson tested Samsung’s first-ever TriFold phone. When it came to the bend test, it felt certain that the slim, double-hinged device would simply snap. But despite Nelson’s efforts, the phone stayed intact. The display, however, stopped working, marking the TriFold out as the first Samsung smartphone to fail Nelson’s durability test.
Despite the screen failure, Nelson declined to name the TriFold as the least durable phone of 2025. That unwanted accolade went instead to Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which launched in October.
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold became the first phone in a JerryRigEverything durability test to explode during the bend test. But what upset Nelson most of all about Google’s foldable phone was that the company, which had described the new handset as “extremely durable,” had failed to strengthen the weak point along the antenna line where the two predecessor Folds broke in the same test carried out by Nelson in previous years.
“Having the audacity to call the Pixel 10 Pro Fold ‘extremely durable’ during their launch event while not changing the antenna line locations from the previous two versions that catastrophically failed is an insult to tech enthusiasts everywhere,” Nelson said at the time, adding, “For sure, hype up the phone, but don’t lie about it being durable if you didn’t change anything to make it more durable … this is by far the weakest folding phone I’ve ever tested.”
Speaking during his phone awards video this week, the YouTuber followed up: “If you treat your phone nicely, it’s probably not going to break. But as a manufacturer, if Google knows there’s a weak spot in their design and they don’t address it, that’s kind of a big deal because some of us do care about durability.”
On a more positive note, the award for most durable phone of 2025 when to the incredibly rugged Tank 3 Pro. Acknowledging that the Tank 3 Pro is something of a one-off, the YouTuber selects the OnePlus 15 as the most durable mainstream phone of the year.
Check out Nelson’s video (top) to find out which other phones picked up awards.