Every year the market for phone cases is increasing, however, for a number of reasons some people prefer not to cover their phones. Photo: Unsplash / 123rf
Should you consider ditching your phone case in favour of a case-free lifestyle?
BBC senior technology writer Thomas Germain told Sunday Morning although phone case sales was a multi-billion dollar industry, a small "rebel contingency" was bucking the trend and going caseless.
Every year, the market for phone cases was increasing, however, for a number of reasons some people prefer not to cover their phones.
One possible reason people might be going caseless was to give off an air of "class and confidence".
"You're less and less likely to see a case in the hand of a rich and famous person.
"I talked to some people that did feel it was part of a look. That was why they were skipping the case," he said.
People also objected to having a cheap case covering an expensive product.
"One person I spoke to said 'look, I spent $1000 on this phone, and now I'm going to put a $30 piece of plastic between me and this gorgeous device?'. It just doesn't make sense to some people.
"But, you know, to some other people who want to protect their enormous investment I think that skipping the $30 case is the part that seems crazy," he said.
However, phones just tended to be able to withstand more punishment than they used to, he said.
"Apparently they are much more robust."
How do phones break?
The screen is the weak point of the cellphone.
"The vast majority of the time when your phone breaks it is the screen cracking, at least according to consumers," Germain said.
However, this had been improving over the last few years, with fewer people breaking their phones, he said, citing a an insurance company study.
"There's a trade-off ... You can either make the screen more scratch resistant, or you can make it more resistant to drops and breaks.
"I seems like in recent days they've made the trade to protecting you from breakage and drops, and apparently this is making the phones more susceptible to scratches," he said.
However, he said it was hard to get clear data on this.
The glass used for many cellphones these days was manufactured by a company called Corning and known as Gorilla Glass. It was made much tougher than normal glass through chemical processing and rigourous testing, he said.
"The people at Corning are like medieval torturers. They put their phones and their glass through all these horrible, you know, rituals. They drop phones from increasing heights, they have special glass scratching machines. It's like an arm with a little metal spike at the end of it, they drag it across the screen. They put it into a tumbler with keys and makeup to simulate what the phone will go through in a purse or a pocket.
They also analysed phones that were damaged "in the wild" by real consumers to determine exactly what went wrong and to prevent it from happening to the newer glass, he said.
Germain's experiment
To test whether going caseless was was classy or crazy Germain said he decided to go caseless for a month and write up his findings for the BBC.
"I pitched my editor a story about it. He liked my idea, he thought it would make a great article. But he assured me the BBC would not be paying for a phone repair if the experiment went south."
"I've always been a case guy. But I took the case off and spent a month living without it. And it was kind of nerve-wracking at first ... and I did have some accidents at first, you know, I'm probably the worst guy to conduct this experiment. I'm an extremely clumsy person."
He said he dropped his phone several times throughout the experiment, including a particularly bad instance when he dropped it down the stairs outside his apartment.
"It did have a little gash in the aluminium side of the phone ... but I turned it over, I looked at the glass and the thing was fine."
Despite the drops, he told Sunday Morning his phone was still caseless.
"At the same time it did feel really good, I love the way that this thing felt in my hand without a case.
"This feels embarrassing to say but it did, kind of, feel like it was a cooler look."
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