I found out about this today; but apparently last month the actual incident took place in Minnesota. I just needed to share this in case you haven’t heard about it!
Jarrod McKinney’s iPhone 4 — a notoriously fragile device — cracked when his 2-year-old knocked it off a bathroom shelf.
“I was like, ‘Man! That’s all it takes to crack the glass?’ ” he said.
So it’s easy to see why McKinney, a 37-year-old in Minnesota, would be “just absolutely shocked” when that same phone survived a fall from his pocket — while he was skydiving from 13,500 feet.
He found the gadget, its glass surfaces shattered, on top of a building about a half-mile away from where he landed with his parachute.
Joe Johnson, a skydiving instructor, said he and a few friends watched from the ground below the two-story building as McKinney raised the phone above his head in triumph after he located it using a GPS tracking app.
Just to be funny, Johnson decided to call the busted phone. He didn’t expect the call to go through. But it did. McKinney felt the phone vibrate and started laughing.
“They were all like, ‘It works! It works!'” he said of his friends watching his rooftop search from the bottom of the building.
That’s especially amazing since the iPhone 4 can suffer from cell reception issues. When the Apple smartphone debuted in 2010, a saga the tech media called “Antennagate” followed. Consumer watchdogs claimed a design flaw on the phone’s antenna caused it to drop calls unexpectedly. Apple gave out free phone cases to address the issue.
Johnson, the skydiving instructor, was so impressed with the whole ordeal that he plans to pick up one of the phones sometime soon.
“It goes to show you if I crash land and need an ambulance, they can still track me down with the GPS,” he said.
Some Android phones — Apple’s main competitors in the smartphone field — are perhaps better known for their durability. As CNN’s Mark Milian reports, Google, which makes the Android mobile operating system, launched several of its phones into space, tied to balloons.
Also, in case you were wondering if it’s weird for a skydiver to take his phone on a jump in the first place, apparently it’s not.
Well, we’ve seen phones that come into the shop looking worse than this if you can believe it. There’s no shortage of cracked glass out there, but this is a story that seems pretty extreme. I thought that I’d heard it all until today, thanks to Jarrad for sharing!
Have an iPhone 4 with a busted screen? Click here to get the repair started!
Take care, Ryan
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