Want ultimate protection for your iPhone when you are hurling yourself out of airplanes? Get an Incipio case, which helped the unlucky iPhone 4 pictured above survive a two mile free fall, albeit not without some war wounds.
CNN reports that an unlucky skydiver accidentally had his iPhone 4 slip out of his pocket during a dive. It fell 13,500 feet to smash into the hard surface of a roof somewhere a mile or so downwind of where its owner parachuted to earth.
When the skydiver got to the ground, he ended up trying to locate his iPhone. To his surprise, he was able to track it down, and found that while the enclosure and touchscreen were broken, and the Incipio case was destroyed, he was still able to make and receive phone calls.
Heck of an advertisement for Incipio, eh?
[via OS X Daily
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
30 responses to “This Skydiving iPhone 4 Survived A 13,5000 Foot Freefall”
how many of these articles must there be?
Define “survived”.
I would say the fact that it was able to still make and receive calls…since it is a phone…would define “survived.”
Is it supposed to be 135,000 or 13,500? I’m guessing it’s the latter. Sloppy proof-reading.
13,5000? Someone needs to change that to 13,500
SkyDiverMan’s opening line at the Genius Bar – “I was just pressing the home button, and the whole screen just shattered. Is that covered under AppleCare?”
Guess that’ll be 13,500 – anyone at 135000 would have just left the ISS!
A 135,000 foot fall? I wasn’t aware that the SR-71 was still flying, and that pilots were throwing iPhones out of the cockpit at Mach 3.5+.
If he had a Otter Box then the phone would have “survived” all the way.
Um.. If it fell 2000ft or 13,500ft it’s the same. The iPhone doesn’t travel faster than its own terminal velocity if it’s dropped from a little bit higher…
I think this comment is the funniest part of the story! Very clever!!!!
“How long after you pressed it did it shatter, Sir?” “Oh, at 0 feet or so.”
Dropped call. No big deal…
My Iphone4 survived the fall at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok last June 2011 while i was on the escalator of the 2nd floor all the way down to the ground floor….it was still working…thanks to the Iphone cover tat i got at apple store…m Aza from KL
The usual idea is that you would use NFC to set up the link between the two devices and then do an automatic hand over to a different protocol for doing the actual transfer of data – eg Bluetooth,iphone 5