Isn't it funny how people scoff at <i>ruggedized</i> phones for being "ugly" but then go and slap all kinds of chintzy cases and screen protectors to their fragile phones, making them much uglier than the rugged variant and just barely more resistant to damage than without all that crap?<p>Mind I have never broken a phone, and I take good care of all the units I have had, only replacing them due to obsolescence.
off-topic, but couldn't find a contact form on the website.<p>Priceonomics need to improve their search results. If you navigate through categories the results are well organized... but if you try to use search it does not organize the data properly.<p>I can drill down through your results to find the Honda Civic prices per year: <a href="http://priceonomics.com/cars/honda/civic/" rel="nofollow">http://priceonomics.com/cars/honda/civic/</a><p>But I can't <i>search</i> for those results.
<a href="http://priceonomics.com/search?s=honda+civic+2006" rel="nofollow">http://priceonomics.com/search?s=honda+civic+2006</a><p>There's the same problem with phones. Navigating the listing to phones I can find the iPhone 2G:
<a href="http://priceonomics.com/phones/apple/" rel="nofollow">http://priceonomics.com/phones/apple/</a><p>But if I search for the iPhone 2G:
<a href="http://priceonomics.com/search?s=iphone+2g" rel="nofollow">http://priceonomics.com/search?s=iphone+2g</a>
I've broken enough phones in my life to know that I need to have protection[1], and frankly, I love the rugged size of the otterbox defender on my Moto Photon.<p>I'm notoriously clumsy with my gear and would rather spend the $50 for a nice big rubber case (improved grip and drop prevention) than wait to drop it.<p>Beyond that, come summer time, I'm a big time beach bum, but I still have to run my business and that means bringing the phone to the beach. Having an "almost completely contained" case is a godsend to protect it from the occasional drop in the sand.<p>Frankly, I'd rather prevent than repair, though I'm not exactly afraid to take the phone apart should I bust the screen, but I might as well invest a few bucks to make it near-indestructible. It just makes me feel better.<p>[1] Broken two flip phones in half, smashed the screen on a few others, dropped two in water (one toilet, one lake, not that an otterbox will help that much), ruined the shit out of the buttons (power, volume, keys, whatever) from sand. I'm sure I'm missing some.
It appears from the chart your chances of dropping your phone and having the screen crack are higher in the South than the North.<p>Could it be that Houston summer heat makes your hands sweaty and that means you're more likely to drop your phone? Yet another advantage of living in a frigid climate.
Interesting. Maybe you could do a rational economic calculation based on value lost per destructive event, frequency of events, and odds that such event will happen before a non-protected event (loss, theft, crushing which exceeds the resilience of a case). Compare that with the cost of a case and the value lost by using a case (ugliness, size).<p>Although I took my magpul case off my iphone 4 today (to use a tascam im2 microphone), and it's really hard to hold the glass surface, compared to the nice plastic surface of the case.
So how much money can someone make buying cracked phones, fixing them, and reselling? I guess it only takes one person doing this to normalize the price of a cracked phone.
Check eBay for parts! From a simple search I can see that a replacement back for the iPhone 4s costs about $4 including shipping. Nowhere near the $120 iCracked charges according to this article.
I cracked the screen of my iPhone 3G a few years back. Rather than get it replaced, I decided to keep it like that since the touchscreen was still perfectly functional. I thought it made an interesting juxtaposition, and I loved the looks of horror mixed with pity people would give it whenever I nonchalantly used it in front of them.