Built to meet military specifications for dust, shock, vibration, and extreme temperatures, the Samsung SGH-A657 is one beast of a phone. Sure, it’s probably not going to win any beauty contests – but if a gun fight were to break out during the beauty contest, the A657 would probably be the last one standing and win by default. What it lacks in beauty it makes up for in the fact that it could probably beat you up.
When Samsung offered us a review unit, we only had one question for them: “Can we beat it up?” “Of course,” they said. So, we’ve come to you, dear readers, for ideas. See, we’re so used to treating these review units with respect that the meanest thing we can think of is to call it names when it’s out of the room. We want to find out just how rugged this thing is, and we want to capture it all on video.
We’ll freeze it, we’ll throw it into a wall or two – but what else should we do? Drop a comment below with your ideas. If we use yours, we’ll drop your username in the video out of gratitude.
Can you shoot it with a gun. Do some myth buster explosion on it? Drop it from your grips as you are skydiving? Electrocute it? Put it on a burner, microwave, toaster? Throw it in a pool?
I’ll go skydiving this weekend if you guys will send me the phone to “drop”- seriously we can meet up in Lodi and go nutz for almost nothing. :D
Simple….. Run it over with a truck. Now that I’d like to see since i ran my g1 over
Does it survive?
Drop it from a 4th floor window onto the pavement.
let a rotweiler chew it.
put it in the laundry wash and dry cycles.
and all that good stuff.
or maybe do what happens most phones… get drunk and drop it down the toilet.
Well, I’ve been in military and now in automotive engineering; automotive is in at least some instances more harsh than MIL standards.
Run some regular test at room temp.
Run the same at cold (perhaps in steps, 0 C, -20 C, -40 C) then hot (100 C, 200 C).
Do some drop tests onto hard surfaces from increasing heights, like 4 feet then 6 feet, and as high as you can go.
Try some weight drop tests, set the phone on a hard surface and drop weights on to it from various heights.
There is an impale test, you have a spike with a mount that will hold the phone on top of the spike, and you drop weights onto the phone so it has the possibility of being impaled.
Immersion tests, soak in water and test function after removal, soak in salt water and test function after removal.
All of this is dependent upon what the specs for the phone indicate it can withstand. I would guess if it says it can withstand 4 hours at -20 C, then try that, and be careful to test what the stated limits are before destroying the thing and not having tested some of the interesting features.
There are always tests where it samples are destroyed, it is seeing at what point will it keep working.
Fun stuff!!!
Wack someone’s head with it. See if it would knock the guy out.
Or stab it with a combat knife.
This thing might be too heavy but I highly recommend strapping about 20 bottle rockets to it and sending it airborne. You’d definitely need to go with the upgraded bottle rockets and not those puny standard variety. My late 80s GI Joes would testify that it was always an awesome experience for them.
I can tell you from experience that the Samsung SGH-a657 does not do well being submerged in water – even as little as 4-5 inches. Just did it for the review unit we got at MobileBurn and the entire right column of numbers quit working for 2 days while it dried out.
Does in blend?
Use it as a lacrosse ball in Central Park, toss it around and scoop it up as a ground ball / ground ball. The constant impact and dust and dirt it would accumulate would actually be a decent way to test it out.
*ground ball / ground phone — woops
Take it to a nearby coin-op laundry and place it in one of their dryers. The Temp setting is up to you.
Falling from a running moto, or falling into the sand/water border at the seaside are the worst things happened to my phones until now… But the thing which is commonly killing my apparels is a much simpler one: temperature excursion. Condensation is such a devilish thing =P
Waterboarded it
Best comment yet. But I think you meant “waterboard it”.
I doubt it is meant to meet the military water resistance requirements, so drops, dirt and dust are pretty much the legitimate tests. Drops should probably be in the four foot range onto a hard floor.
After it survives those, a water test (say 30-60 seconds under a foot of water) would pretty much be a “real world” set of circumstances for it to survive.
Not all that bad looking a handset, actually!
will it blend?
Send it to war. Ship it to Michael Yon or Michael Totten. It’ll support a blogger and it’ll give you a report from someone who can tell whether it’s good enough or not.
Well, if it’s mil-spec you could try shooting at it…
blowtorch
How about some rapid extreme temperature cycling? Alternate dips in near boiling water and ice water.
@Ted
if you want it to explode, why not just use explosives..
may i suggest eating it!
or spray it with meat spray and trough it into a cage of ferocious animals (afc, you have those…)
Have fun with the test like: hanging it off a dog’s collar (try duct tape and wire ties) and track it via Google Latitude or give it to a teenager for a week (with their SIM). Maybe have a person in the office take it (with a working SIM) for a day of torture^D^D^D testing while recording said tests & comments with their own phone camera. Compile a week’s worth of testing.
Make the tests have a little reflection of real life. “Will it blend” kind of abuse has just gotten tired. Or go full tilt and do a Mr. Bill style video. =)
Drop it in a bucket of water, leave it there for about 25 seconds, then take it out. I.e., the dreaded “toilet drop.”
The 25 second period is to mimic the time elapse of “hmmm, should I reach in there and retrieve my phone or just flush it?”
Burn it, run it over with a truck (ask your local city workers to lend their tires for this test, if not, ask a gym and put as much weight as you can on it), smash it from a considerable height, toss it from a moving vehicle, leave it under the sun, pour sand then mud and then water over it, make it ring on your toilet’s tank, and test what does it take to scratch its surface.
Then shoot at it (a shooting range might be of help in this case) with several guns and/or rifles.
If by any chance it sports a mini USB connector to interface to it, first connect it using all your flavors of Windows, at least one Linux distro (something like Fedora or Ubuntu) and OSX, to see which one recognizes it or not.
By then, if it’s still alive … get someone to hack into it and change the logo at boot from (maybe) samsung’s to Engadget.
After that, the video should be posted on Youtube (so go all Mythbusters with it) and sell the phone on ebay for charity (get someone famous to sign it first)… All proceedings could go to whatever charity you want (but since it’s military grade stuff maybe something for your local veterans could be in order).
Maybe Engadget will start a Smash&Crash lab with a video series that would surely be fun? One can only hope!
Freeze it into a round disk and then play hockey with it!!!!!
give it to my daughter-
she’s on her 4th phone in the past 12 months
Lol! The best test sounds like the one from Drew.
Fact is though, it’s only a cell phone, and any idiot can fully destroy any cell phone in seconds if they want to. It’s all pointless unless you TEST it per the mil-spec that it’s certified to. And it’s also pointless unless you run the same test side-by-side with at least 2 other cell phones to see how much better the A657 will hold up.