Joby Ingram-Dodd is a lucky guy. First, he has an awesome name which sounds like he’s a successful gold prospector from the 1800s. And second, he bought a tough-as-boots iPhone.
Oh, and he has, like, the best job ever.
You see, Joby managed to drop his iPhone 4S 60 meters (almost 200 feet) from the top of a wind turbine onto a concrete parking lot way below. And guess what?
Yes, it kinda survived.
This week I was working in Northern Ireland inspecting wind turbine blades by abseiling down them.
Joby uses his iPhone’s camera to take photos of his inspections, but it slipped out of his pocket when he was (literally) hanging in the air. Now, if I saw my iPhone, or really anything that had just been attached to me go spinning off into the distance like that, I would have frozen and shut my eyes tight. I know this from the experience of a thousand anxiety dreams.
But Joby, cool customer that he is, just kept on working. When he finally got back to the ground (he doesn’t say if he kissed it and started crying in relief, as I would have), he found the iPhone bashed up and with the screen shattered, but “still basically in one piece.”
The next surprise came during lunch, when the phone started to ring: “Looking at it the screen still worked and I could swipe to answer check my emails, go to Facebook. In fact it works fine, even the camera still works.”
Pretty amazing, right? Joby thought so too:
It just shows how well built these phones are, any other phone would have splintered into hundreds of bits with a fall from that height.
So forget about your fancy ruggedized cases. The iPhone is tough enough already. In fact, probably the only thing Joby has to worry about in the future (apart from that whole hanging-by-a-thread-200-feet-above-the-ground thing) is the light weight of the iPhone 5 he’ll presumably buy next. This will cause it to flutter slowly towards the earth, whereupon it will doubtless be snatched from the air by a mischievous magpie as it glints in the sun.
Thanks: Joby!
