Irony of Phone Design
My last phone was a Droid Turbo (or some variant of that). It was a tank (and btw the battery was so large it would last a week). It was also butt-ugly, but you could drop that thing from an airplane and it would probably keep working. I never bothered with a case.
My new phone is a Galaxy S8. It is probably, looks-wise, the acme of phone design right now and the polar opposite in attractiveness from the Droid Turbo. But it is literally almost all glass. The front is glass. The back is glass. The sides, dues to the curved bezel, are mostly glass. If you drop this thing you are going to hit -- wait for it -- glass. I was changing cases on it and dropped it from a height of no more than three feet and both the front and back glass shattered. So you MUST put this expensive phone in a relatively bulky case. You can have a slim case that may or may not protect the screen and sort of retains some of the feel of the curved bezel or a bulky case that probably will protect the phone but makes the entire phone design moot.
My point is that companies seem to be designing phones for how good they look and feel in the Verizon store**, rather than how they will actually look bundled up in a large case in real life. Once you provide reasonable life-protection for the S8, all its expensive design features are covered up.
One thing I have learned during this experience is that the vast majority of the millennials who rate cell phones on review sites like Engadget are wildly over-influenced by aesthetics. For example they all seem to downgrade phones that have larger bezels and metal rather than glass packaging, irregardless of reliability. I am still looking for a site that publishes a good list of drop test results and ratings. I don't think I will buy another phone without seeing these results (I was considering a pixel 2 until I saw is horrible drop results). I would also like to see someone who grades phone aesthetics in the sort of cases we are all going to put on them. Honestly if I had time I would probably start my own review site focused on real-world use, emphasizing characteristics like reliability, repair costs, drop test results, and battery life.
** For a long, long, long time, TV manufacturers ruined TV pictures so they would look better in a store. Every TV you could buy, at least in the pre-LCD era, had super-high color temperatures shifted way up into the blues. The colors looked like crap in a dark room watching a movie, but the picture appeared brighter in the TV showroom. Back in the day, one of the first things one would do with a good TV if one was a movie snob was to get the TV color calibrated or look for a TV that had a color temperature setting.
