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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.
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
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.
You sound like those crazy sociology professors who get pissed at words like "manhole" and "mankind." It's part of the presentation style, relax.
It adds another word to the bland summary.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
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?
Anyone have a link to the actual video? The provided link just keeps playing a PBS commercial at me.
-Peter
That's how they broke it. One too many pledge drives and the poor phone just couldn't take any more...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
You all have it wrong, technically he apologised.
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
I hereby suggest "but it's no match for a British journalist" as a new catchphrase.
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?
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.
Make something idiot-proof, and the world just makes a better idiot...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
But... Iron Man was a Fe male...
When I was at school this kid was showing off his unbreakable watch. I said I bet I could break it. He said 'go on then' and gave me the watch. It's amazing how much pressure you can apply to something with a point. In this case the point of an iron (we were in an art room) was more than a match. I still feel bad about killing his watch though :(
Which is why I'm always careful to say "mailman or femailman"
All publicity is good publicity?
well, we now have the idea of an unbreakable phone in our head.
& we probably think of it as something that is difficult to achieve and mostly likely attribute value to the product.
Volume on the BBC Video player still "goes to eleven."
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)
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
John Stewart is good, but he's no match for a British journalist.
That's not so bad. I'd rather be hung than hanged...
"I didn't expect some kind of British journalist!"
*danger chord* "Nobody expects the British journalists! Our chief weapon is surprise!!"
and so forth.
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
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.