I am an early adopter. I got my iPhone the first week that it came out and I’ve been very, very happy with it. Yes, I shelled out $599 for it and of course I used the $100 rebate to buy a Nano when the offer came up. Since I travel a good distance to get to work I find myself using most of its features to be both productive and also to keep myself entertained. It is handy, rather elegant and the screen is amazing to watch videos. I used to lug around my PSP for portable entertainment purposes but I find that my iPhone meets or exceeds all of my needs.

Looking at it, you can see how well it was designed. The optical glass is scratch resistant and the case is designed in such a way to dissipate the force of impact if it is dropped. I’ve accidentally dropped mine a few times and it still looked and behaved perfectly. Until the other day.

Stop, drop and howl

Above are a few of the many ways that you can drop your iPhone. This thing is designed very well considering that it has optical glass as the face of the phone. If the phone falls on its edge or side the energy is quickly dissipated around the rest of the phone. If it falls on its corner then the force is blunted by the curve. If the phone falls on its face then the optical glass is supposedly scratch resistant and the force of impact is transferred from the front, over the curved edges and then to the back.

In fact, the phone feels like it is weighted on the back so that it doesn’t fall on its face and scratch the glass – sort of like dropping a piece of buttered toast. This is all fine and well and good, until it is 30 degrees outside. And you drop your phone. And it lands on its back. The result?

Yep. It done broke. It fell flat on its back. (click on the images for a larger picture) I was walking two dogs for my friend Amy and as I got off the phone with her and I was putting the phone in my pocket one of the dogs jumped up and knocked it out of my hands. It fell from about waist high and smacked flat on the ground, screen up. If you look at the design of the phone you’ll see that the glass receives all the force of a drop to the ground. I called Apple and scheduled an appointment at the Genius bar the next day. When I got there I told them “Yeah, I have a little scratch on my screen that I don’t have any success buffing out. Can you fix it?”

I didn’t think I’d grow attached to my phone but I did. When something like this happens, all you can really do is laugh. They gladly replaced and reactivated a new phone for me. The most painful part was waiting for my name to be called.

When I pulled out my phone they looked at me like I was nuts. $261 later I got a new phone. Yeesh. It isn’t as much as buying a new phone but it also isn’t free. From what I understand AT&T doesn’t offer insurance on smartphones, so I was pretty much SOL. Either that or I could have kept my old phone and used it with the cracked screen and smearing blood all over it because of the sharp pieces of glass protruding from its face.