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CES, Reporter Breaks "Unbreakable" Mobile Phone
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Reporter Dan Simmons from the BBC's technology show Click managed to break a mobile phone marketed as 'unbreakable' (video), during a demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas." The phone can survive a 10 story fall, being submerged 20 feet for 30 mins, and you can use it to hammer a nail; but it's no match for a British journalist.
All publicity is good publicity?
--- I'm sure using a computer was fun back in the 80's. *sigh*
You can destroy anything if you apply the right force. Making a bald statement that a phone (or anything else) is unbreakable will just prompt some folks to find the right force, even if it isn't something the phone would normally experience.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Uh...
Is this live? We can edit that out right?
Ok, reset. Ready? Take TWO!
Where's the "titanic" tag?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
RTFA to WTFV can anyone tell us how he breaks it?
Seriously? A story about breaking a phone which surprisingly is not unbreakable? If it's a slow news day at least put it in idle!
Meh.
Only British hacks come with that special "wrecking mode"??
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
Anyone have a link to the actual video? The provided link just keeps playing a PBS commercial at me.
-Peter
You sound like those crazy sociology professors who get pissed at words like "manhole" and "mankind." It's part of the presentation style, relax.
Seriously, I wouldn't consider it indestructible at least until you can try to nail it to the wall WITH a hammer and nail - and it still works.
It adds another word to the bland summary.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Demo dyndrome is alive and well! :)
I am sure nearly all of us knows how he feels.
I remember when Oracle was unbreakable. Surely it is computing taboo to use this description
He just smashes the screen against the corner of the fish tank that he just failed to drown it in. Not being covered in rubber like the rest of the phone, it breaks like any normal screen. You could probably apply the same pressure by accidentally dropping it on a jagged rock.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
but is it unblendable?
It's not as if we wouldn't have known anyway: his first reaction is to apologize profusely.
An American journalist would've rephrased the marketing blurb on the phone, not tried it out, and welcomed our new invincible mobile overlords, only to be made fun of by Jon Stewart later that night.
The "unbreakable" phone being actually breakable is nothing extraordinary, but the awkward position the reporter puts the guy on is priceless. And I have to tell you the reporter was pretty gentle with the phone.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
Don't even get me started on "huMANs!"
Screens are always the weak point of a phone. I would surprised if any lcd screen can withstand a direct contact with only the screen (generally by corners or pointy objects). Thet have the drop issue solved because they assume the casing will absorb the shock on a flat surface.
Working for a phone manufacturer it took us month of back and forth with the LCD manufacturer and reinforcing plastic to make our phone's LCD not break from a 1.5 meter drop. So 10 stories is impressive!
The key to breakage here being that when they said "You can hammer a nail with it!" they didn't mean, "You can hammer a nail with the screen"
Screens will always be the weak point until we get that transparent aluminum out there to shield it while keeping it visible. And even then, you know, that little display would still be susceptible to heat. I have a hunch a lighter would have had similar success in destroying the screen.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Something very similar is how I broke my phone. it hit really hard on the edge of a desk or something when it was in my pocket. The screen was even protected by a SD to CF converter, just happened to be between the screen and what ever it hit. The SD to CF converter was trashed and so was the screen on my phone. My phone was not unbreakable.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
TFA is from BBC, journalist is British and it is a form of national pride.
"Brits can do the undoable, break the unbreakable."
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My dad told me the story of when he was 16 (around 1966) and the local hardware store had got in unbreakable dishes (Corningware I think), and being a young imp, he decided to give it a shot. He dropped the plate on its edge, which, apparently is the weak spot on such dishes, and it literally exploded. He did this, naturally, during a product demonstration, and was promptly banned from the store.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
From TFV... the screen still worked - it is just that he apparently cracked it.
Not that you could actually tell from the video.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The yellow sun rays from his teeth did it?
You've changed, man. It used to be about the music!
Or, wait...what was Slashdot about waaay back in the 900,000 range of UIDs?
An American journalist would've rephrased the marketing blurb on the phone, not tried it out, and welcomed our new invincible mobile overlords, only to be made fun of by Jon Stewart later that night.
It's a bit offtopic but I just heard something about this on NPR recently:
For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, "What would Walter think?" Nowadays, it's not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it's more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.
Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host "has gone from optional to indispensable" in just a few short years.
I found it odd yet telling that keeping anchors in check is not regulated by role models today but rather the court jester. Indeed, my opinions of both Fox News and CNN have dropped significantly from watching a few shows of Stewarts where he systematically picks apart their idiocy with a montage or just pointing out the obvious. It's like an MST3K recap of the day's news ... except with a bizarre twist: the truth.
My work here is dung.
Our Nextel rep tried to sell us on some of their rubber-encased, bulky "ruggedized" phones last year, bragging about how they met U.S. military specifications and so on. We tried out a few, and one of the maintenance guys out in the shop managed to break the "push to talk" button on his the first day he had it. A couple others developed keypad failures in a matter of months.
The fact is, the cellphone makers come up with these claims based on very specific types of "accidents", such as the phone's ability to survive submerging in water to a certain depth, or surviving a drop from X number of feet. In the real world, people find MANY other ways to break these devices that weren't even investigated. (The guys in our shop do a lot of grinding and cutting of steel, for example. Eventually, the little metal filings find their way into the cellphone's speaker, where the magnet in the speaker causes them to collect up - until they make a big enough pile to short things out. When disassembling "dead" phones, we've found that a number of times. But I haven't seen a single cellphone maker take any steps in their design to prevent THAT mode of failure.
Somebody tell me what nationality the phone is!
Apparently, USA-ian.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The Shrike broke it. Reporter Dan Simmons included that scene in the next Hyperion book.
If you are patient enough the story does follow your PBS commercial.
More specifically, he beats the phone on the corner of the metal frame of the aquarium, where the metal comes to a point. Which cracked the display.
Hubeings!
Don't even get me started on "huwoMANs!"
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
but was he British?
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
That is the most blatant false advertising since my lawsuit against the movie, The Neverending Story.
This was worthy of a front page post? I saw that video earlier, thought "heh" and moved on with my day. Is there really anything more to discuss here?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Will it blend?
... but will it blend?
Will it blend? - iPhone
Like you said... the guy broke the "push to talk button." The rubberized casing would prevent the keys from getting pushed on a fall to a flat surface, but I'm sure pretty much ANY of these phones will break simply by pushing buttons too hard.
And if that fails, smash the screen against the corner of a fish tank.
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
Eh? Whats wrong with videos?
Because Brits have a Stiff Upper Lip. Great for breaking phones, summers where it never gets above 50, and attempting to conquer places like Afghanistan and India.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Now if you said that an adult opened a child proof bottle, I might get impressed. But a kid, no.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Not only do those explode quite spectacularly, but the shards are amazingly sharp. I don't envy the person who had to clean up that mess.
About half as many stories per day.
Breaking other peoples stuff since 1583!
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Instead of being shocked or dismayed, he actually laughs at it. That is, to me, the best possible way he could react. The only thing that could have made it better, would have been if he had said something like "well, you've just earned yourself a new phone".
Obviously rather than dipping the phone in water, it was put into a solution of sodium pentothal, and the phone barked "Enough of this torture, I'll give you the contacts list". And thus the phone was "broken."
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Just say that it is tough not unbreakable
What's what I got as well. On the third reload I got a different commercial (Toyota) and then the video played. Chrome on Snow Leopard.
-Peter
Give it to a 6 year old boy.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Are you sure he wasn't French?
He said the guy apologized, not surrendered.
#DeleteChrome
My dad told me the story of when he was 16 (around 1966) and the local hardware store had got in unbreakable dishes (Corningware I think), and being a young imp, he decided to give it a shot. He dropped the plate on its edge, which, apparently is the weak spot on such dishes, and it literally exploded. He did this, naturally, during a product demonstration, and was promptly banned from the store.
That sounds like Corningware alright... When that stuff breaks, it's very serious about it.
Bow-ties are cool.
Epic fail... though I have to say the rep did do a good job showing humility. Good PR in the end.
You all have it wrong, technically he apologised.
Here at work, we've gotten free devices with kevlar-coated screens on occasion for software development. One of our developers accidentally split the device's case in half from a 3 foot drop when they're supposed to have a 6 foot drop spec. :)
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
huwoWOMANs?
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
This reporter (an alien no less) is interfering with a cell phone company's ability to profit from its invention.
Call Homeland Security!
Hah, I just GNU that would come up
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
An excellent court jester is the best of role models; they allow themselves to be the butt of many jokes while exposing the truth often at a potentially signifigant cost to themselves.
Jon Stewart is an excellent court jester
You all have it wrong, technically he apologised.
Absolutely hysterical. Well played. I can't believe this hasn't been modded up given the usual numbers of regional spelling and grammar threads.
Entropy just isn't what it used to be.
He often doesn't need to really point out anything. Simply display a video of what someone said yesterday next to a video of what they said two years ago.
I hereby suggest "but it's no match for a British journalist" as a new catchphrase.
We had a set of such dishes; the bowls will break after being dropped from a cupboard, bounced off the counter and dropped to the floor several times.
And yes, when they do finally break you can pickup the pieces, all 50 bajillion of them, with their razor sharp edges.
I have a small scar on one toe from when a bowl exploded and a small piece skimmed across my foot.
Had a book of Politically Correct Nursery Rymes..
It should be Persun, and Womyn, and Humyn.. Then, there is no sexism. Damn those nursery ryhmes were funny.
Don't forget Femail..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
It's called Corelle. Man, that stuff is dangerous!
An acquaintance of mine who suspected that he was being BSed by a sales person asked if his project had passed the Bal Conies test.
"Yes, it certainly has," he replied.
"Really!" he said. "Let's see." He then took the device in question and dropped it off the Bal Cony.
Sadly, the device in question did *not* pass the Bal Conies test.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Meatbags is what the droids refer to us as.
But... Iron Man was a Fe male...
British mouths are like diamonds; the funky teeth bend light around them causing them to sparkle and glow unnaturally, and they absorb all colors except yellow.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Because its funny, you ass. You're the kind of person that really can't take a joke and causes wars over a fucking joke.
The Internet, it's serious business.
Don't wait until the product is on display at an international convention to validate claims of ultimate reliability.
Which is why I'm always careful to say "mailman or femailman"
I still say "HK47 error" to refer to "meatbag incompetence".
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
It's standard practice to list the affiliation of reporter/media personality when they aren't being shown/published on their own network/paper/whatever.
So to break it down for you, "Reporter Dan Simmons from the BBC's technology show Click..." means:
Dan Simmons - that's his name, duh
Click - what he's from
technology show - describes the focus of click, so nobody mistakes it for a photography show or other things.
BBC's - indicating Click is on BBC, so you again don't mistake it for Southern Swaziland's Castanet music show, Click (among others)
Are there really that many people who go actually take the term "unbreakable" literally and need to be protected from "blatant false advertising"? Personally, I just mentally translate it to "really tough to break accidentally".
Volume on the BBC Video player still "goes to eleven."
Free Advertising. They only use "indestructible" to attract people to try and destroy it.
Court jesters have often played the role of pointing out the poignant truths around them with just enough humour to avoid being hung for noticing.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Hehe, my friend has one of these phones and broke it in the first week by using a compressed air line to blow dust and crap off it. The external speaker thing broke, so now it has no ring tone and he has to use vibrate. The earphone and the mic survived so it is ok to make calls. Don't knowif it is no longer waterproof.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
huwogrrlz?
Be glad that that phone was not 'shagged by a rare parrot' ;)
If they think it's unbreakable, all we have to do is find a four year old boy who will be happy to prove them wrong.
In addition to providing entertainment, wasn't the court jester supposed to keep the monarch humble by pointing out things that others would not dare? I'd say Jon Stewart makes an excellent jester in that regard, and all the more power to him for it.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Glenn Beck gets ripped for a hell of a lot more than that...
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
John Stewart is good, but he's no match for a British journalist.
maybe he was an ex Squaddie they can break anything
I don't remember one of nursery rhymes...I think you may be referring to the works of James Finn Garner. I had "Politically correct bedtime stories" and "once upon a more enlightened time", and they were excellent. If there was a nursery rhymes one that I just missed, that'd be great.
~Beowulf cluster of nested robots?
That's not so bad. I'd rather be hung than hanged...
So true. I accidentally shattered one once by pressing it with a rocking chair. The plate split into shards, but since it wasn't from a drop, they stayed in place. It was so impressive to look at, I got the SLR and spent an hour photographing it.
"I didn't expect some kind of British journalist!"
*danger chord* "Nobody expects the British journalists! Our chief weapon is surprise!!"
and so forth.
He used to be.
Im surprised no one posted this... But the phone guy promised the guy a free phone if he could break it... pay up?
Just because it works, Doesn't make it right. - JTM
Enough already.
So you're ready to surrender then?
Too bad for the phone maker it was a simple act of smacking the thing like a child would or an angry person.
Spot on
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
and they'll just build a better class of idiot.
Not that the journalist is an idiot but its the same principle. Make something indestructible and they'll just come up with a new way of destroying it.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Need to remove the point of contention with a hu-bris.
Hmm...
I like it. It fits.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
About 25 years ago, I worked in a home/garden store that sold glass fireplace doors. We always told customers that they were "unbreakable", so they didn't have to worry about their children falling into them and getting hurt, or sudden changes of temperature causing the glass to shatter, etc. To demonstrate, we always took a fireplace poker and offered to let the customer hit the door as hard as they wanted. If they declined, we did it for them. We had done this hundreds of times, and never had a problem. One day, I was working with a customer and telling them about how they wanted to make sure they got one that was shatterproof so they wouldn't have any problems; I was facing them and swung the poker backwards into the door and heard this most horrific *CRASH*, *tinkle*, *tinkle*. I think I only stumbled slightly as I finished "like this cheap style here" and pointed them at the next higher model. Then I broke down laughing (and so did they), as I told them we must have weakened that one with repeated abuse (if you looked at the other panels and the doors themselves, you could see how often we had hit it). They ended up buying one anyway, so it was a good story and a good sale.
Not Corning. Corelle (slightly different product, same company).
CorningWare is marketed for it's resistance to thermal stresses (going freezer to over).
Corelle is marketed for it's durability (though it has problems with thermal stressing).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Back to the original NPR piece... The point was that Brian Williams said they'd stop and do a double take on some stories if it felt like it could turn out to be comedy fodder. As in rewording some lines. It isn't that Jon Stewart is right but that his presence makes people stop and wonder if they're going to look like a fool before speaking.
Sure there have always been political comedians. But the Jon Stewart Show is now big enough that you can't just ignore it. This is also an era where you can't just have some one-off news reports that people will forget about in a day. Someone (Jon, Glenn, etc) will dredge it up later.
About twice as many relevant stories per day.
There, FTFY
Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
That is not metal; it's a pair of plastic strips glued to the aquarium to make it look better and to support the lamphouse. If you look closely you can see the glass of the aquarium crack in the corner where he hits it. It would have been cool if he broke the aquarium too :)
-- Cheers!
There's no such thing as unbreakable.
He wasn't the first to break the phone, but this Dutch reviewer did need more time (and more tools).
Coffee spurt moment. well done.
A sig is placed here
To display how futile
English Haiku is
The absorbent rubber will also reduce the tactile sensation of pushing the button, so a person will use more pressure to push the button though it will feel the same to them.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Actually he has mocked MSNBC, you dont watch the show do you?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The word "man" originally meant the entire human race. Later on people decided to call the sexy ones "Woohoo man!" or "woman" for short.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Mail order brides?
"And the circle is complete..." Nicely done.
If this phone was truely unbreakable, we should use it as armour plating on tanks.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
When I was in Uni in the late 70s I went out one day to buy a cereal bowl. One of my housemates was along for the ride and was rather shocked I'd paid $3.50 for a bowl. "But it's Corelle, it's unbreakable" was my reply and I threw it up in the air to let it land in the parking lot.
It broke. I could have bought 4 china bowls for the same place.
Corelle is "unbreakable" like the 60's watch I'm wearing is "waterproof". It's really water resistant and Corelle is actually shatter resistant.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I can actually here Jeremy Clarkson saying this in my mind. Not that he's really a journalist...
-- QED
I found it odd that the NPR reporter didn't ask Brain if he thought that being owned by the larges military contractor in the world doesn't effect how they report on politics or military spending.
EVERYONE IS FREAKING BIASED TO THEIR OWN BELIEFS
What an amazing revelation. You must be one proud 13 year-old.
try to understand the point of view of the other side, which, even when you don't think you agree, 9 times out of 10 what the other side is saying has merit
Where did you get that statistic from?
if you're too stupid to realize 'your political party' or 'your news channel' isn't just as fucked up as the other side,
Except that isn't true. Some sides are more correct and truthful than others. Thinking that everything is equally biased is as stupid a fallacy as thinking there is no bias.
The fact is that when it comes to many issues, often one side is just lying and spreading propaganda that has no basis in truth. Sometimes both sides are, but that's much rarer.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I found it interesting that groups of conventioneers had to head over to the Las Vegas Apple store to see something interesting this year. The company that wasn't there was a bigger story than just about any of the companies that were. So I'm not at all surprised that a cell phone breaking is big news from the weekend. The smart ones skipped the convention center altogether and spent their time in the Venetian listening to high end audio systems and pretending to care what the cables were made of....
The phone was designed to be unbreakable provided you're doing anything with the phone besides using it as a phone. I mean, seriously, how often are people near 10th story balconies? And supposing you did drop it in 20 meters (65ish feet) of water, unless you were just getting ready to go SCUBA diving you're not getting back at all, let alone within the 1/2 hour time limit that's certainly specified in the warranty. And I can't tell you the number of times I was doing a little carpentry, and they only tool that was available to me was my cell phone. For me, from personal experience, an "unbreakable" phone would be able to survive all of the following:
-Repeated trips through the washer and dryer
-Left outside, in all weather, for 2 days
-Abruptly sat on, on a hard bench or concrete ledge
-Stepped on, screen side up or down, on various surfaces from carpet to gravel
-Thrown across the room in anger/frustration
-Left on the dash of my car when when it's 110 outside and 195 in the car
-For flip phones: landing open, hinge side up, then being stepped on
That's the environment it needs to be designed for.
Wasn't expecting to read a 1970s Bill Cosby joke on /. today.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
My dad told me the story of when he was 16 (around 1966) and the local hardware store had got in unbreakable dishes (Corningware I think)
Probably was Corelle.
We just need to start removing safety barriers, seat belts, warning labels etc.
Safety should be optional.
Then you can up the publish rate for Darwins. Publish it in newspapers; "With great thanks from the human race, Darwin of the week goes to ..."
Deleted
I take unbreakable as a personal challenge
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
I think they're both supposed to be the same stuff - Pyrex (another brand). However, in the US, I think they changed the manufacturing process of it and that introduced the shattering/exploding tendencies which has led to some investigation - although no conclusions were reached, according to the wiki. I seem to remember reading somewhere that the Pyrex used in the US is different to that used on the other side of the pond, though, and that it is particularly vulnerable from being removed from a freezer to be put straight in the oven (tendency to violently explode). Certainly the (UK) Pyrex dishes I have have never shattered - I managed to get one to chip, though. Have not tried sticking a frozen one into a hot oven, and it's not something I'd care to experiment with.....
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
If the guy was a redneck from the south, I think the article would have mentioned shotgun pellets...
perSUN?
that's starist!
No. He's a little to one-sided for my tastes.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba