A slew of phones fell into tech YouTuber Zack Nelson’s hands this year, and every single one of them underwent his pretty brutal durability test.
The multi-pronged, if somewhat unscientific, test that Nelson conducts for his JerryRigEverything channel involves bringing various sharp-edged tools to the surfaces of each phone, covering them with sand, and holding an open flame to the displays. Finally, Nelson bends the phones with his bare hands and brute force to test their structural integrity. Some remain intact. Crack something. Some fall apart.
Nelson recently tested Samsung’s first TriFold phone. During the bending test, it was certain that the slim, double-hinged device would simply collapse. But despite Nelson’s efforts, the phone remained intact. However, the display stopped working and the TriFold became the first Samsung smartphone to fail Nelson’s durability test.
Despite the screen failure, Nelson declined to call the TriFold the least durable phone of 2025. That unwanted award instead went to Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which launched in October.
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold was the first phone in a JerryRigEverything durability test to explode during the bend test. But what angered Nelson most about Google’s foldable phone was that the company, which had described the new device as “extremely durable,” had failed to reinforce the weak point along the antenna line where the two previous folds broke in the same test Nelson had conducted in previous years.
“To have the audacity to call the Pixel 10 Pro Fold ‘extremely durable’ at launch while not changing the positions of the antenna lines compared to the two previous versions that failed catastrophically is an insult to tech enthusiasts everywhere,” Nelson said at the time, adding: “Sure, hype the phone, but don’t lie about it being durable when you haven’t changed anything to make it more durable… this is by far the weakest foldable phone, that I have ever tested.”
In his phone awards video this week, the YouTuber added: “If you treat your phone well, it probably won’t break. But if Google, as a manufacturer, knows there’s a weakness in its design and doesn’t fix it, that’s a big deal because some of us value durability.”
On the bright side, the award for longest-lasting phone of 2025 went to the incredibly sturdy Tank 3 Pro. Acknowledging that the Tank 3 Pro is something of a one-off, the YouTuber picks the OnePlus 15 as the most durable mainstream phone of the year.
Check out Nelson’s video (above) to find out which other phones won awards.
