Zack Nelson Just Proved Samsung Has Been Sitting on a Secret All Along with Their Rugged Galaxy XCover7 Pro

Zack Nelson of JerryRigEverything does not mess around when a new phone shows up claiming to handle real work. His latest target is the Samsung Galaxy XCover7 Pro, the company’s current rugged workhorse built for construction sites, emergency crews, and anyone who treats a phone like a tool instead of a fragile gadget. What he found challenges years of industry talk about why modern phones cannot combine a sealed body with a battery you can swap yourself.

Samsung advertises the XCover7 Pro as being ready for whatever the front lines throw at it. The IP68 designation indicates that it is dustproof, and it may be submerged at 1.5 meters for up to half an hour because it remains sealed. Military-grade testing includes a wide range of potential hazards from the factory, including drops, severe temperatures, vibration, and anything else it can think of. The screen is a 6.6-inch Gorilla Glass Victus+ beast that operates at 120Hz. Inside, there is a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, 6 GB of RAM, and 128 GB of storage, all of which can be expanded via microSD card. All of this is powered by a 4,350 mAh battery, which you can replace whenever you need one. The cameras feature a 50 megapixel primary sensor and an 8 megapixel ultrawide. The programmable buttons, which allow workers to set one-touch actions for radios or scanners, are a great touch, and the device costs around $600.

Nelson begins with his normal test, the scratch test. The screen puts up a good fight, but eventually marks at Mohs levels 6 through 7, as one would expect from glass. He did, however, advise users on job sites that glass does break, so keep this in mind, even though a replacement screen costs just $23. A brief hold of the screen near a flame reveals that the pixels are black and that the display is an LCD, not an OLED. Nelson believes the $600 price tag will be harder to justify now that he has worked it out.


The side-mounted power button also functions as a fingerprint reader. Nelson decides to give it a thorough scrubbing, but the button just keeps moving. The volume rockers simply come loose in the normal Samsung fashion, but the larger programmable key remains firmly in place and can initiate a walkie-talkie mode or access an app without unlocking the phone.


Nelson then performs the bend test by removing the back panel and pulling the battery first. Because the solid glass back is no longer there, the phone flexes far more than a typical Samsung flagship. Even so, it will not fracture, kink, or break in any way. Nelson still refers to it as passing his durability test, and while it did not go without a hitch, you can’t exactly call it a failure. The fact that it has a plastic frame and a metal mid-plate underneath indicates that it has adequate structure to withstand stress that would shatter thinner devices.