Apple’s debut mobile phone reached a cult status despite the many compromises. That’s a rather plain gadget with the only two advantages of a large screen and multi-touch functionality. Some of the features look simply clumsy – you can’t flush down all contacts or messages (sic!) with a single function, - and the same goes to sending more than one file over Bluetooth, - you will finally have to do a phone-to-PC synchronization to apply mass actions to files, messages and other types of records, which is something balancing between unexplainable and outrageous. People don’t have a PC or a laptop with you all the time, and a mobile phone is usually to cope with the typical tasks without any help from stationary equipment, which is well indicated by the ‘mobile’ adjective. We could go on for ages listing iPhone’s numerous weaknesses, but all of that was hushed, smoothed and gently pushed into the backstage by the pompous promotional campaign combined with the brand’s established reputation.

The success is explainable not only by an aggressive advertising campaign, but also by iPhone’s status of a fashion product using a lot of metal, an elegant interface and some less important but neatly looking features. Large quantities of illegally imported iPhones are in current circulation in Russia, numbering in over than 100,000 copies, the majority consisting of the original non-3G version.

On the threshold of iPhone’s official Russian release we decided to carry out a crash test to warn our reader of the hidden difficulties and weak spots they may face after acquiring a copy of Apple’s brainchild. All of us make mistakes, some of them exposing our phones to a very unlucky fate. We did our best to bring the testing conditions as close to real life as possible, emulating a number of force majeur situations that can happen to your phone. The list of test runs like this:

• Freezing (12 h, -20 C)
• Falling (1.7 m)
• Dust and sand test (vacuum cleaner, 10 min)
• Extreme vibration (washing machine, wringing - 500 turns/min, 5 min)
• Beer (15 sec) and water (10 sec)
• Pressure (car)

We tested an original non-3G version with a metal cover. The new 3G version is going to be much less resistant to the elements, which was mentioned on many occasions on our and other site. The large differences lying between iPhone and the phones sporting a more traditional build explain the unpredictable outcome of the crash tests performed on the former. A 3.2’’ touchscreen is something which has never been through a crash test before, let alone the rest of non-canonical modules.

Work experience

Let’s start with our account of a year’s getting along with an iPhone. The device proved to have few physical weaknesses which is something unusual for a largely fashion product. The face panel glass is surprisingly durable, providently made so to avoid any problems with an entirely touchscreen-oriented gadget. Just a few small scratches appeared over the twelve months of use, but nothing graver than that.

The metal framing was chipped and dented at several spots, but those were hard to spot. The back panel was not so lucky, it turned out to be iPhone’s weakest spot. The shiny Apple logo came to look worn and shabby. Worn spots popped up on the rounded edges. The plastic pieces was the thing which suffered the most, wearing down to a state where a matte worn strip surfaced through the destroyed coating.

Let’s note that our copy of iPhone has been through a year of at least partially careless use, - the original owner didn’t even carry it in a case, - but the final result seemed to astonish even the convicted skeptics. As for the battery, no miracle came about – the effective capacity dropped by roughly 15%-20%. All in all, the drop rather natural than really bad. By the way, here comes a picture of Nokia N95 for your comparison; it was bought on the same day with iPhone and was in a comparably active use:

Regardless of the unofficial status of iPhone in Russia (so far! but this is to go soon), numerous iPhone repair services sprouted up all across the country. The prices are very high, and one of positions sounded like this: “The iPhone training course”. This course costs ~ 15 euros. Here’s what was meant by comfortable and intuitive operation?

Freezing

As you probably know, Russia is a country where 9 months out of 12 are, mildly saying, a bit too cold. It’s hard to believe when you’ve got temps between +20 C and +30 C outdoors, but at the threshold of autumn were determined to see how well iPhone would fight against the cold. Going on vacation somewhere in the Alps is another chance for your iPhone to catch or cold (or not? you will see later), so this test is an actual thing anyway.

Exposed to a blistering cold, a phone is going to suffer from a number of factor. The battery is its weakest spots, which can normally function at temperatures above -10 C. Lower temperatures may bring about serious trouble ranging between temporary malfunction to irreparable damage. Freezing also drains the battery charge by shrinking its maximum capacity. The screen is often affected by a color palette corruption and an increase in inertness. The camera is probably the one thing you shouldn’t worry about – we never registered any accounts of serious camera damage from cold.

As long as we haven’t got any snow in the streets so far, we emulated the harsh conditions by placing the phone in a common freezer. The testing period was set to twelve hours. The temperature was around – 20 C, more or less accurately maintained by the simple home appliance. At the beginning of the second hour, white frost covered the casing surface in plenty. The liquid crystals powering the screens were rendered slow, as the refresh rate was dropping and the picture became visibly inert. Save for this thing, the rest of the functions still worked the way they were supposed to, that is the phone didn’t had any problems dialing and receiving, etc. The battery charge didn’t go down by a single percent! After two more hours, the screen inertness came to be even worse, artifacts sprouted about the screen and all sorts of nasty things started happening to the picture. We even were guessing about a permanent camera damage, since the image grew blurry; but after a five minutes’ thaw everything was reverted back to the norm.

After another three or four hours the iPhone screen ceased to respond to the touch. We weren’t able even to unlock the device or answer an incoming call. This isn’t due to the cold fingers or insufficient contact between them and the screen because of the hoarfrost, but rather a state of complete insensibility. It took less than two minutes for the touch sensibility to reestablish, though, and nothing was damaged. The problem can easily be resolved by breathing into the screen in real winter conditions.

Given these discoveries, we decided to let the Apple’s gadget stay in the freezer overnight, from 12 P.M. to 12 A.M. Ironically, iPhone didn’t die from that, on the contrary it retained a full functionality and even missed some eight calls in the morning. The only two perceptible degradations after a night in freezer were a slight increase in screen inertness and a certain decrease in keyboard responsibility. After a few minutes of thawing back to the normal state, even these two symptoms were gone for good. The battery charge level jumped from 6% to 59%, which is a normal behavior for this type of power unit exposed to an extreme cold. The only thing we didn’t like is that the handset wouldn’t boot up with a 6% charge, obviously thinking that was not enough to try and do a normal boot – once the loading progress reached 50%, the phone went offline as if its charge had reached a total zero.

Roughly in five hours after the experiment started, thermodynamics got into action and some buttons were froze to the point where they couldn’t move and be pressed. This effect was especially severe in the power button seated on the top edge of the handset. That means you risk getting your iPhone paralyzed after a prolonged exposure to an extremely cold environment. The bad effect was much milder as far as the rest of the buttons were concerned.

During a spell of warmer weather in a snowy winter, the air moisture often keeps on a high level; the half-molten snow rapidly turns into blobs of water as it touches you skin, so your hands are also often moist. That’s why we did an extra test, holding a melting ice cube over iPhone so the water dripped right on it. Moreover, after being removed from the freezer, it quickly became covered in dew from the melting hoarfrost, which was a good emulation of use in frosty weather and temperature jumps. To do Apple justice, none of our meteorological diversions resulted in a permanent malfunction or irreparable damage. We shall see about iPhones resistance to liquids a bit later, now it’s time to figure out if the gadget survives a nose dive from an average man’s height.

Falling

Falling stands among the most common causes of phone damage and malfunction. A travel out of your pocket down to the carpet is probably the mildest case, imagine your phone slipping from between your hand and your ear and going all the way down to hit a concrete flow. We dropped the iPhone from heights of 1.6 m (average human height minus the few centimeters to match the ear position) and 1 m – the assumed pocket height. Statistically, the biggest damage from such occasions is done to the casing; the battery would often escape the battery bay because of the impact. Often, the battery bay lock ends up broken. Considering the impossibility to remove the battery from an iPhone, this ought to be a very important matter to review.

The aluminum battery bay cover stood brave against the impact produced by dropping the phone on asphalt. We dropped the smartphone prone and angularly. Before facing asphalt, the handset went through a preliminary training bumping on the grass, where it was able to end up unharmed after a two meters’ fall. The same was with an office floor carpet. But after crashing against asphalt, at certain microscopic spots the paint started to peel off. There appeared a slight play between the cover and the casing. The rest of the elements were still unharmed. The screen was barely scratched and worked just as good as before the test.

Bumpy Ride

This test emulated multiple bumps and jumps on a hard surface at a small amplitude. We used a washing machine set to work in the wringing mode. The phone was being executed for fifteen minutes at a 500 rounds per minute rate. Of course we didn’t fill the machine with water. In order not to miss anything which might have gone missing from the device over the course of the test, we put the phone in a plastic bag prior to the beginning.

After it was all over, we discovered a number of worn and scratched spots along the back panel’s perimeter, but the biggest surprise was that the screen suffered virtually no damage! That convincingly proves the extremely high quality of the materials used. The 3G version of iPhone can’t boast such a high quality of materials and assembly, that’s a very important fact. Should it have been through a trial like this, the glossy back surface would have gotten scratched all over.

Sand and dust

A phone’s ability to resist the dust intrusion isn’t an aspect of primary importance, but neither is it a matter we could afford omitting in our survey. In addition to exposing iPhone to dust, we also did a sand test. This was meant to emulate a handset’s falling into the beach sand when you’re on vacation. We employed a vacuum cleaner to shower the handset with sand and dust over a period of fifteen minutes. The handset was placed inside the dust bag during the test.

The lack of a protective flap on the interface slot and audio socked led to the openings getting totally stuffed with dust. We had to blow it out using the corresponding mode set on the vacuum cleaner. The casing stood well against the sand; it didn’t get any new scratches. Amazingly, the dust never made it under the screen glass, which is the most important point about this test: iPhone proved to be a handset fit for people dealing with dust at the job, neither it is going to submit to the beach sand.

Keep an eye on the speakers, though. The speaker openings on the casing can easily get stuffed with dust which is very hard to remove and reduces the maximum sound volume by about 30%. The openings are too small for the blowing out method to succeed, so the dust stays until you find a way to disassemble the phone and clean those form inside, at home or at a service centre. The same is true about the audio socket, even the hairdryer wasn’t helpful. We weren’t able to do away with the dust using any home methods, so no normally working headset or speaker without visiting the iPhone service people.

Pressure

We used some of the cruelest torture methods in this test and slowly drove a Mitsubishi Eclipse over the phone resting on the ground. This was enough to crack the thick glass protecting the screen. Here comes a weak point in the smartphone’s defenses – we didn’t expect it to break right after the first ride.

The touch functionality and normal screen image didn’t go away, though. It was but the glass which was damaged, but not the screen itself. The touch responsiveness was still in place. The handset was working in the usual way, received incoming calls, played the tunes and vibro signals, etc. So even the hardest pressure doesn’t do any real damage to the device’s functionality, even though the casing and the screen glass risk being easily deformed.

Beer and water

Liquids naturally pose the largest threat to electronics; we didn’t go too far away with our fancies and took a bottle of random low-end beer in a nearby kiosk. After the beer test, the smartphone was additionally rinsed in water.

The choice was based on a very simple logics – beer is a popular drink and is probably second in likeness to get spilt over your sell phone after water and water-based drinks like tea or coffee. Larger quantities of beer increase the chance of such a misfortune, due to the obvious effect of alcohol on a human being’s coordination of movements. As for water, the danger ranges from letting the handset fall in a puddle to a cup of coffee getting toppled over your smartphone resting on the desktop. The consequences may vary wildly. Some handsets can be revived after a thirty minutes’ diving session while others pass away after a few seconds of direct contact with liquid.

We were amazed to see iPhone normally functioning mid-deep in the liquid. In ten seconds, the device was still normally functioning, entirely consumed by beer! A rinse with water warded off the beer smell, though did nothing to stop the handset functioning (even given the fact that the screen protective glass was cracked so the liquid could freely make it in). The only apparent consequence was a smear-like image corruption which occurred along the crack in the glass. The beer smell was the only sign of the recent calamity, the handset kept running all right. Such an endurance is something we would hardly expect from iPhone – but that’s for real.

The nine lives of iPhone

Regardless of iPhone’s reputation of a valley girl’s best friend device sporting elegant design but not too bright about functionality, it must be admitted that the quality of Apple’s work is unmatched. You wouldn’t expect an iPhone to be as damage resistant as an older damage-proof Siemens, yet for a conventional phone it scores an absolute win.

Let’s mention it again that the 3G variant of iPhone is less durable and doesn’t offer any serious technological advantages, often selling cheaper than the original. So we advise you thinking twice before picking a 3G iPhone. The latter, as proven by our extensive testing, can go through all sorts of trouble without getting out of order. The weakest points, if such words are applicable to something naturally meant to be fragile, are the screen’s sensitivity to physical pressure and cold; nevertheless the phone didn’t suffer much after being through the rest of the trials.

Most notably the device stands against dipping in liquid. Neither beer nor water were able to do any serious damage to the hardware and functionality (even with an already damaged screen glass!). Before iPhone only specially designed waterproof handsets were able to stand things like that.

We can surely advise getting an iPhone as a reliable handset fit for the most extreme travels. You should only keep in mind that the functionality of this device may disappoint you in many aspects. You won’t be getting anything close to the traditional level of functionality provided by Symbian or Windows Mobile smartphones. iPhone’s biggest advantage is the elegance of design, functionality coming only in second place.

SMAPE.com reliability rating

Freezing	3 points out of 5
Falling	5 points out of 5
Extreme Vibration	4 points out of 5
Dust and Sand	3 points out of 5
Pressure	3 points out of 5
Beer and Water	5 points out of 5
Final Score	23 points out of 30

We will go on with crash testing various models, exposing them to the extreme conditions. We are interested in your suggestions sent to playdead1@gmail.com and your opinions on what handsets you would prefer to see crash tested in our lab, what additional types of tests should be applied to the test samples, or just see your very own photos of tortured phones.

Author: Dmitry Ryabinin, ryabinin@corp.mail.ru

SMAPE.com

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