This Annoys Me
Do… do I even have to say anything about this? I got that less than a week ago and it’s, while still functional, it is now useless. Not just from a cosmetic standpoint, more from a “I don’t like microscopic shards of glass in my fingers” standpoint. At least the inner display is fine and that’s the important one. LG… we need to have a talk.
The Incident
Fall height: pocket height, which on my person is 31 inches (78.74 cm).
Reason: Phone tangled in pocket, causing grip to fail. Once no longer supported, phone fell to the ground.
Impact description: Hit top-right corner first, then fell face up, damage visible immediately.
The Reaction
I mean first off, I got the thing for $100 from a friend, back when they were not sold separately. AT&T just started selling them case-only, $160 each. Excuse me, But I refuse to essentially be fined $160 every time my fingers get sweaty, my pocket is weird, or some idiot slaps my phone into the floor.
Now I did some work with said friend. LG is not covering any of this under warranty, however will accept a non-warranty RMA for about $30 (so I’ve been told, have not been given the exact bill yet) to deal with it. Light-years better than $160, still stings a lot when you think about everything involved. But let’s get to the point of this: the case design.
The Design
The LG V60 Dual Screen Case, a device I was so eager to get my hands on, does a fairly decent job of protecting the phone. Pretty much all of it is rigid plastic, minus the 100% completely glass front that, to my knowledge, doesn’t even seem to be Gorilla Glass. The crack pattern you see there suggests actually something pretty standard, like… regular glass. Yes, the outer part of the plastic is rubberized for grip and texture, something that I appreciate much more, knowing the consequences of failing my iron grip, but it’s still solid by the end of it, the entire thing has no flex whatsoever. Hitting the back is probably going to be okay minus a scuff or two, but hitting the front? Time for a new one.
Seriously LG what were you thinking?! It has an entirely non-Gorilla-Glass front that does functionally nothing except look cool and be a fingerprint magnet, but it turns out that it’s not even required, as demonstrated by the LG Velvet. I linked to the Reddit post because OP there mentioned where I brought up that exact shortcoming: it’s entirely glass.
Yeah, no, okay… some posts have been “rants” before but I’ve never been this emotionally charged before.
At the end of the day, I buy a case for my phone (minus this one exception) as a device to protect said phone. I come from a time when we built things to last more than a microsecond, and therefore still have the expectation that a case will not catastrophically destroy itself in the process of saving my phone, this is why I love OtterBox cases, especially the Defender series. So now, do I need a case for my case? I don’t like the feeling of holding what’s essentially an all-glass device, that’s perfectly thin, smooth, small, and super easy to drop, I can feel my palms sweating already. Similarly, I don’t like the feeling of holding an expensive, no-mistakes cover that can’t handle any impulse load without cracking something.
LG… people drop their phones, assume people will drop their phones! When people start trying to find the best way to cut a piece of vinyl sheet to stick on the front to.. okay really, just hide the glass so if it cracks you can’t tell, then you need to rethink your design for when the next iteration comes around. Quite frankly, that case design is just… well, stupid.