Core77

People with glass housings shouldn't throw iPhones

By Rain Noe - June 10, 2010

in Object Culture

It was awful, the noise; I was running full-tilt with my dogs when my iPhone 3G freed itself from its holster, flew through the air and hit the pavement--noisily clattering, bouncing and scraping its way down 25 feet of sidewalk like a very expensive skipping stone.

I stopped and picked it up in horror, expecting to see the spiderwebbed glass I'd seen in so many web photos, but was shocked to see the glass was unblemished. Instead the brunt of the damage had been absorbed by all four corners of both the chrome bezel and the plastic housing, as you can see in the two photos below.

This was last month, and the phone still miraculously works. But a week later my neighbor dropped her iPhone while fumbling with keys, and the entire front of it shattered like an opera singer's windows. A far less dramatic drop than mine had ruined it.

My point is, it seems to be total luck as to whether or not your dropped iPhone will shatter, depending on how it lands. So it is with a grain of salt that I read a company called Fix Your i's entry covering the iPhone 4's new specially-toughened glass:

[Our drop test] was performed from 3.5 ft up...The iPhone 4 did survive 2 drops, as expected, but on the 3rd drop there was a loud POP, and...shattered glass.

While the company was immediately taken to task by skeptics for not showing video, and accused of promoting their own repair services, they do make a very good point about the design of the housing:

On the new iPhone, the glass basically sits on top of the aluminum frame. On the old iPhone, it was recessed and protected by a chrome bezel.

I can definitely attest to the efficacy of the bezel...while my neighbor cannot. So will the new bezel-less design of the iPhone 4 prove easier to break? I'll tell you in a few weeks, after I get one and my dogs see another squirrel.

o

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Dee

14 years ago

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that's why i own a sonim phone with gorilla glass!
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dylan

14 years ago

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When my 3G iPhone fell 30ft from the top of a grandstand on to pavement I could only expect the worst. To my disbelief all it had was a tiny scratch on the corner of the case! I have a feeling the new 4G version wouldn't have faired so well being the glass would have taken the impact...toughened or not.
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gregb

14 years ago

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At one time I ran an R&D group at a large consumer products company. We performed numerous "drop tests", as well as developed some pretty accurate computer simulations. Generally, most products can survive a drop on the face or the sides, but NOT the corners. A corner drop concentrates the impact force in a small area and creates a fracture wave that radiates out into the product. Rounding the corners. or adding even an 1/8" of foam, or (in larger products where there is room) some internal shock mounting) eliminates the problem. Its one reason so many small consumer products have large curvature corners. But the tighter design ethic at Apple prohibits graceful corners. The lesson- always buy a rubber case for any iphone.

BTW, once I was sitting in a DoD waiting room, and overheard a munitions supplier complain that while his large caliber bullets could survive a drop on either side or the base, a 45 degree drop (e.g on the rolled edge of the shell) damaged the bullet. His solution? They were lobbying the procurement division to remove the 45 degree requirement. Presumably, in the field bullets would agreeably refuse to drop at an angle....

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