A few reasons why getting insurance on your phone might be a good idea
1 Drop It
Two of the things that separate us from more primitive creatures are our opposable thumbs and fine motor skills. They allow us to do all kinds of wonderful things, like fashioning tools and playing musical instruments. But for some reason, these qualities count for very little when you’re holding an expensive smartphone. Obviously not everyone is as clumsy as we are, but we’re sure that at least a few of you have done what we have, where you’re holding your trusty phone in your hand, perhaps while making a call, and it just frees itself of your grip and lands face down on the floor. If you’re lucky, when you pick it back up, it’ll look the same as did before its rapid descent. If not, you’ll find the screen has been scratched or, worse still, cracked. The good news is that you’re allowed to cry.
2 Drown It
Quite a few top-end smartphones now feature water resistance, but it’s probably fair to say that most are extremely averse to contact with liquids. It’s pretty obvious that you shouldn’t dunk your handset into water, but unfortunately clumsiness combined with proximity to fluids sometimes means it happens anyway. In the Micro Mart team alone, at least two people have managed to do this, with one of us dropping a phone in a toilet and another submerging their device in a pint of beer. At least in the latter case, that person had something to drink to console himself afterwards.
3 Flash It
When we’re not dropping our phones onto concrete or into water, we also like to tinker with them. After all, there are basically miniature computers, so why wouldn’t we? That, as you might have guessed, includes messing around with the software they run, by flashing new Android ROMs or jailbreaking iPhones. So far we’ve never managed to break one of our devices by doing this, but head onto the internet and you’ll soon find many horror stories from people who say they ‘bricked’ their phone by attempting software modifications. Thankfully, in most cases, these devices aren’t truly bricked and can be recovered, but sometimes there really is no way to rescue them.
4 Crush It
Most modern phones are fairly robust, but they should still be treated with respect. So if you’re in the habit of putting your fancy mobile in your back trouser pocket, it’s best to remove it from that position before you go sitting down. Even if you’re particularly svelte, smartphones really aren’t designed to withstand the entire weight of an adult human pressing down on them. If you do managed to sit on your phone, you’d better pray that crunching noise is coming from your stiff back and not from an expensive electronic device that’s just been reduced to smithereens.
5 Blend It
This particular mishap is unlikely to befall on your phone unless you happen to work in a blender testing facility, but thanks to blender company Blendtec and its founder Tom Dickson, we know that smartphones really don’t like being subjected to fast-spinning blades. The ‘Will It Blend?’ series of viral adverts has seen Dickson blending all kinds of things to demonstrate his products’ power. Of interest to us here, though, is his destruction of mobile devices, and if you head to youtu.be/lBUJcD6Ws6s, you can witness him turning both an iPhone 6 and a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 to dust.