Jefferson Graham

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — The minute we heard those stories pop up about the iPhone 6 bending epidemic, we had to try it for ourselves.

Was there truly a design flaw in the big, hard to get iPhone 6 that turned it into swiss cheese after laying dormant in your pocket for awhile? Did it really become like chocolate on a hot, muggy day? Chewy and bendable?

We saw the online videos of the bending iPhones, and read many of the tweets claiming the same issues. So, we pulled our review copy of the iPhone 6 Plus, removed the case, and tried it ourselves. Gently, at first, then with a little more force.

Bent? Not exactly.

We tried again. This time harder. But not so hard that the phone would crumble into hundreds of little glass pieces. We have to return the review phone to Apple, after all.

My colleague Laura Mandaro claimed she saw a tiny bend. "Slightly," she said.

I didn't.

So we left the bureau and went out to busy Powell Street here, where tourists stand on line — not to get new iPhones, but for the famed cable car local attraction.

Many of the folks we approached had heard about #bendgate and accepted our invitation to try bending the iPhone 6 Plus.

"There's no bend on this," says Adam Levine, from Brighton, England.

"I can't bend it," said his wife Lisa, "Absolutely no bend."

"I think maybe there's a trick to it and we don't know what it is," said Steve Kehoe of Boise, Idaho.

Don Garrison, a tourist from Connecticut, tried a little harder, and ended up agreeing with Mandaro.

"You can bend it if you try hard enough," he said. "It bends slightly if you put pressure on it. But nobody's going to put that kind of pressure on it. It's a narrow phone, designed to be narrow."

Readers: is your iPhone 6 Plus bent? Write me and send in your photos — we're all ears! jgraham@usatoday or @jeffersongraham on Twitter.