Almost everyone has a smartphone these days, and a nearly inescapable part of smartphone ownership, as most of you are by now no doubt aware, is the bane of cracked screens. Some devices are more prone to them than others, and yes, cases are available — the bulkier they get, the safer your screen — but even then, if you drop your device just the right way, you could still end up with a broken screen. Often, the cost of fixing the device outweighs the cost of a new device.

This has been an issue with smartphones since the form-factor was first introduced in the early 2000s. A recent inflection point that’s added some complexity has been the introduction of foldable screens.

Devices with foldable screens have been out for several years now, and they have several advantages — they’re smaller — you can have a tablet-sized screen in the footprint of a regular phone, or you can have a regular smartphone with a “flip-phone” form factor that takes up much less space. There are also some less immediately apparent advantages, for example, you don’t need a tripod for a foldable phone, you can just bend it and set it down and have a stable photography platform, and a lot of apps feature split-screen modes that make use of the fact that you can operate the device while the screen is essentially at a 90-degree angle.

That’s all great. Unfortunately, we come back to the issue of the screen breaking — the bend introduces a point of repetitive stress on the screen, and the underlying electronics. As a result, an already vulnerable part of the device is intrinsically more fragile than it would otherwise be.

I have recent personal experience with this, as a Samsung fold device I own suffered from a screen failure — and it wasn’t actually the display surface itself that failed. The underlying LED surface started experiencing what seemed to be connection issues that gradually spread to the entire screen, after about a year of satisfactory use.

To be transparent, I’m fairly hard on my devices, mostly because I can be mildly clumsy, but it was still a frustrating experience.

It’s noteworthy that the displays are rated for a specific number of opens/closes, or a certain amount of usage, and that number has been increasing with each successive device release, so the technology is improving, but this is definitely one of those cases where you might suffer from being a (not-so) early adapter.

I’m still an advocate of this technology — foldable displays have tremendous potential and there are a lot of use-cases for them — and I liked the phone itself — it definitely had a “cool” factor, and it was surprisingly useful. Will I get another one? Probably. Would I get a replacement plan on it if I did? Definitely.

I’m not saying you should avoid foldable devices, if they suit your lifestyle, or you’re more careful than me, but the fragility of the display should be a consideration if you buy one.