@modestmouse: If your cell phone needs a plastic case to prevent it from *shattering* from a 1 foot fall, you blew it.

@Fulgurite: Or... don't buy a $700 phone that can't survive a small fall.

@The Lab: But not any phone will break from a tiny little drop like that. In fact, every other phone in the world would have had just a little scratch on the metal frame because every other phone designer ever was smart enough to run the glass all the way to the edges.

@vinod1978: You couldn't even measure it as a percentage. I would At Google IO they gave away 6000 phones. But this is 160,000 a *day*. Not a factor even worth considering. Lets be generous and assume they've given away 50,000 phones in the last year (doubtful)... 160k a day is equal to 60 million a year.

@AndrosZ: It's just a matter of chance, which angle the phone hits the ground. This phone *will* break from a 1 ft fall, *if* it hits the edge. A better made phone would *not* break if it hits at the exact same angle from the same height. Other phones use metal and plastic edges to protect the fragile edge of the…

@AndrosZ: Funny, I dropped my smartphone the other day and it didn't shatter into tiny pieces. probably because it wasn't made of GLASS.

@Pook365: There are no protected sides because of how the 4 is made. Glass goes all the way to the edges.

@Doug-E-Fresh-91: Or buy a phone that can survive a 1 foot drop, made out of materials that don't explode on a slight jolt. 2 days ago my nexus one fell from my hand while walking really fast and it skipped and bounced for like 5 seconds, only a few surface scratches on the *metal* caseing.

@Omoplata: Ya, no thanks to that sprint nav, i'll stick with the free google nav.

@komododave: I dropped my G1 countless times. No damage. Just dropped my N1 harder than in this video while walking fast, it skipped and bounced along on the concrete (freaking me out)... and all i got was a couple little dings in the metal case. Thats a solid phone. iPhone 4 is just more fragile, theres no way…

God I hate that guy.

@Realityism: Buy unlocked, no ETF, no contracts, resell on eBay and upgrade whenever you want.

Epic.

@sweetelectro: EVO, Droid X

Yes, there will be a few jobs, but the lions share of the wealth will be pilfered by the cronies and warlords that run that place. Nice to have *something* other than opium for them to pilfer though.

@modestmouse: If it was only published for self interest its a bit counter intuitive. By publishing this, they are essentially decreasing the sales of the iPhone 4, and hence decreasing their business. If they were self interested they would bury this story in hopes that a defective product would become wildly…

@Dirtypas: Not for a Nexus One:

@tazm0n: I'd wager it made it much harder to break, if it doesn't have the internals it must weight a lot less.