[Galaxy S 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] BarryH_GEG:
In terms of what "28" broken AMOLED's means, consider this...

Samsung expects to sell 80MM SGS4's this year and it was launched in April. That's 296K a day sold. So since this thread was started on May 20th, another 8.5MM SGS4's were sold. There are more SGS4's in people's hands (and you'd assume proportionately on XDA) at this point in its lifecycle than all of Samsung's previous phones. If whatever happened to the 28 phones reported cracked affected the SGS4 universally and it was "weak" you'd expect tons more reports of broken displays than we're seeing. And it would be a steady flow, not dribs and drabs.

This thread has been on the front page of the general forum every day since it was started. So everyone who comes to the general forum is aware of it. And the title "S4 Screen cracked in front jeans pocket! Galaxy S4 is very weak!" isn't exactly subtle so you can assume most owners have checked it out. It's been viewed 40K times making it one of the "top ten" threads in the forum based on viewership even though it's only 29 pages long.

Screens (the glass and/or display) break. Has anyone here ever seen someone on XDA post "I broke my screen today and it was my fault?" I haven't. Usually it's the opposite. "I dropped my phone from "X" inches/feet and it broke. My old "X" that I dropped like that never broke." Here's a video posted a few weeks after the SGS3 was released talking about cracking displays. Over the SGS3's lifespan 50MM were sold and it didn't appear (at least to me) any better or worse in terms of display fragility than other big-screened competitors. I had a One X at the time and people in its forum were saying the display cracked too easily so I kept tabs on the SGS3 to see how it was holding up. There were more SGS3 reports but there were three times as many sold as well.

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In the SGS4's case, AMOLED's are going to crack a lot more than the glass panels will. And that's whether they are dropped, stepped on, or stressed. That's pretty clear from the stress test video posted a couple of pages back showing just how flexible (bendable) GG3 is. So I guess there are two ways to look at GG3 surviving where GG2 wouldn't: 1) the fact that the glass didn't crack doesn't mean the AMOLED is weak; it means the glass is now more resilient. Or, 2) AMOLED's cracking is a sign of some type of underlying design or component issue. If that were true 28 is an incredibly low number (at least to me).

How big a deal this is comes down to individual interpretation. How significant is "28" cracked displays being reported on XDA in a highly visible thread that's been viewed 40K times and been on the front page since it was started? And that's over a base of 20MM SGS4's sold to date with some subset represented here on XDA. My take is that if this were indeed a generic problem suffered by all SGS4's you'd see new posts to this thread in ever increasing quantity as more SGS4's are sold. So far that hasn't happened and the reports are nowhere near linear with sales volume.

I offer this only as counter balance because prospective owners and owners are freaking out about what this thread means. If you think about it this thread has been averaging a page of discussion per cracked display reported. There are now more people here terrified of cracking their displays as there are actual cracked displays. And as volume of SG4S’s sold grows I’d expect reported screen cracks will too. But the same thing applies to any phone because screens do crack for numerous reasons and it's never been an owner's fault and since phone's can't talk only one side of the story is ever reported. (not meant to be a put down :) ).