Cracking the case of a smartphone and its unfairly crack-accused case

By the point you learn this, you doubtless could have already seen my upcoming protection of Google’s August product announcement occasion in a bit greater than every week (as I write this), the place the Pixel 9 sequence is forecasted to be launched. Nevertheless, as common readers could recall, I’m nonetheless toting two Pixel 7s as my smartphone “every day drivers”, together with a Pixel 6a as my “vice-phone”:

following a longstanding just-in-case spare technique that as you’ll quickly see lastly got here in helpful!

Smartphones’ utilization patterns make them significantly vulnerable to being dropped, whether or not its onto laborious surfaces or into fluids (equivalent to…err…what’s in a rest room bowl). Mechanical robustness is due to this fact crucial to lengthy working life, a very necessary requirement contemplating their stored-data and app significance to their house owners coupled with their excessive costs. All of which has made their dependence on glass supplies a longstanding necessity curiosity to me.

The display’s an apparent one you actually can’t keep away from, no less than till sensible glasses go mainstream sometime (theoretically), thereby obviating smartphones’ existence rationale. As an alternative, smartphone designers are caught with counting on structurally bolstered glass compounds, equivalent to Corning’s Gorilla Glass sequence, that declare to reduce the probabilities of a crack. Per Wikipedia:

Gorilla Glass…is a model of chemically strengthened glass now in its ninth era. Designed to be skinny, mild, and damage-resistant, its floor energy and crack-resistance are achieved by means of immersion in a sizzling potassium-salt ion-exchange bathtub.

However glass smartphone backs have at all times been a bit weird to me, regardless of that I grok their conceptual advantages, each absolute and relative to different supplies. Corning this time:

As main machine producers unveil their newest fashions, many are making a shift to include extra superior glass into their designs, and never simply on the entrance as a protecting cowl glass. One place the place extra glass is showing is on the again of recent cell shopper digital gadgets. This pattern is especially thrilling as a result of glass gives advantages that different supplies, like plastic and metallic, simply can’t provide.

 With glass on the again in addition to the entrance, the most recent smartphones are assembly aesthetic and design milestones, together with extra elegant type components. However, they provide extra efficiency advantages. The superior bodily and electromagnetic properties of glass make it significantly well-suited to allow new capabilities machine makers are incorporating into their designs.

 So what are the advantages of getting an all- glass smartphone?

1.  Improved Reception
2. Glass is right for the antenna efficiency of your cellphone, not like aluminum and different supplies. Steel supplies like aluminum lack radio frequency (RF) transparency, which means that the antenna embedded in your machine has a tougher time discovering a sign. New all-glass cellphone designs imply extra bars in additional areas resulting in quicker knowledge transmission.
3. Higher Wi-fi Charging
   In the present day’s latest telephones are shifting to wi-fi charging, and for a similar causes listed above, metallic can intervene with wi-fi charging know-how. Glass, significantly skinny, robust glass like Corning® Gorilla® Glass, is used as a substitute for metallic on the again of telephones so customers get a quicker cost with out plugging within the machine to a conventional charger.
4. New Ranges of Customization
   Because the backs of telephones don’t have the identical optical transparency necessities because the entrance show, glass can present designers with new potentialities for personalization. Corning’s true-color glass ceramics — or Vibrant Gorilla Glass — gives superior scratch resistance in comparison with plastic and unlocks a full palette of colour choices with premium high quality picture reasonable photos.

 And eventually, there are the cameras, whose lenses’ outer parts aren’t usually immediately uncovered to the skin world. As an alternative, there’s an middleman clear (duh) protecting cowl that’s mostly glass-fabricated as effectively. Right here, for instance, is the entrance digicam of one in every of my Pixel 7s; word that I’ve additionally acquired a tempered glass display protector on it:

And right here’s the again, for now utilizing a case-less “inventory” picture:

Till just lately, there was just one digicam on the again of smartphones, akin to that on the entrance. However because the Pixel 7 exemplifies, issues have gotten a bit extra sophisticated these days. Left to proper within the picture, built-in inside a typical “bar” that juts out from the again panel, you’ll see:

• The usual main lens, with 82° discipline of view (FoV)
• A spectral/flicker sensor, and above it, twin side-by-side autofocus sensors (neither of that are clearly seen within the “inventory” picture; maintain that thought)
• An ultrawide lens with 114° FoV
• A microphone enter, and
• The LED flash

The Pixel 7 Professional provides a 3rd 5x telephoto digicam, to the best of its now-125° FoV ultrawide lens. And whereas the Pixel 7a seems to be much like the Pixel 7 (albeit with a plastic-vs-glass again), its ultrawide digicam is as soon as once more focal length-tweaked, this time to ship a 120° FoV.

The circumstances I take advantage of on each of my Pixel 7s are Limitless fashions from Mous (Aramid Fibre and Black Leather-based, to be exact), and though they’re a good bit dearer than the no-names on Amazon, they’re fairly slick. For one factor, they’re fairly rugged (once more, maintain that thought):

they usually even have Magsafe-compatible magnets constructed into them:

Additional to Mous’s safety claims, should you revisit the sooner picture of the entrance digicam, you’ll discover a “lip” that extends above the display. That “lip” goes all the best way across the entrance, creating an “air hole” designed to forestall the display from immediately impacting with the bottom if the cellphone lands flat…so long as, for instance, the bottom isn’t coated by rocks or different objects thick sufficient to surmount that hole.

What about that rear “digicam bar”? Glad you requested. Right here’s what each of my Pixel 7s, an “Obsidian” one on AT&T for private use and a “Snow” one on Verizon for work (which I’ve additionally included for enhanced color-contrast viewing functions), seem like from an angle when encased:

Once more, word the “lip”. Right here’s the previous, and the precise topic of at present’s story, straight on:

So…what occurred? In late June, I occurred to look in the back of my AT&T-enabled Pixel 7 and noticed what appeared like an influence crater centered on prime of the ultrawide digicam lens, with cracks emanating from there all the best way to the first digicam to its left. I sadly solely in-retrospect thought that I ought to have snapped a photograph of it (from one other digicam, clearly), however the harm appeared much like a picture posted by Kyriakos Ktorides on X/Twitter:

My rapid response was that I will need to have dropped it, with a pebble or the like impacting and cracking the cameras’ frequent glass cowl. However after wracking my brains, I couldn’t recall any time that I’d dropped the cellphone, touchdown on its again or every other orientation. Theoretically, I suppose I may have popped it with the tip of a same-pocket key, however that additionally appeared unlikely.

So I hit up Google and was shortly (albeit vaguely) reminded of protection I’d beforehand seen on this seemingly pretty widespread concern. Initially, all of the experiences I got here throughout persistently talked about the ultrawide digicam lens location because the harm origination level, so I believed that maybe optical zoom lens back-and-forth motion had impacted the glass, iteratively weakening it to the purpose the place it lastly fractured. However then I remembered that, with a few exceptions, smartphones’ lenses don’t even have moveable parts (except for focus, that’s). As an alternative, they interpolate between the viewpoints of a number of cameras, every with a fixed-focal-length lens, to generate the optical zoom-like impact. Plus, as my analysis ultimately revealed, cracks seen by others didn’t solely originate from the ultrawide digicam space, anyway.

I’d additionally learn on Reddit and elsewhere that Google had been telling of us that, along with phone-drop artifacts, this cracking is perhaps precipitated by utilizing the cellphone along with temperature-change extremes (chilly climes, to be exact). Nevertheless, we’re speaking about mid-summer right here, of us. My spouse and I had additionally simply returned from a visit, however provided that airplane cabins are pressurized, I don’t assume that stress modifications have been guilty (though we did go between 7,500’ elevation in Colorado and fewer than 1,000’ in Indiana, so…yeah, no…)

Ample reporting on-line means that spontaneous cracking unbiased of mishandling or any environmental or different exterior issue is the root-cause conclusion in conditions equivalent to mine. Fortunately, I ended up being doubly blessed. For one factor, I used to be relieved to be taught that I had lower than a month left on my manufacturing facility guarantee (I’d additionally bought a third-party prolonged guarantee on the cellphone, however protection for conditions like this was unknown). And for one more, though Google initially balked at overlaying these specific repairs, as an alternative blaming person mishandling, the corporate finally relented and was doing them without spending a dime beneath guarantee.

Two days after submitting my declare with Google on-line on Saturday, June 29, I had a free-overnight-shipping field and FedEx label in my palms. Two days later, on July 3 (the day earlier than the lengthy vacation weekend) Google had already acquired and inspected my cellphone, confirming that its mandatory repairs have been warranty-covered. The next Tuesday, July 9^th, it was again in my palms, courtesy of one other one-day FedEx cargo and regardless of two middleman weekends and a vacation. As documented, each the entrance and rear digicam modules ended up being changed along with the glass rear digicam array cowl. It’s seemingly good as new, and whereas it was away, I pressed my Pixel 6a into service in its stead, backing up the Pixel 7 then restoring the backup to the Pixel 6a beforehand, and reversing the method upon the Pixel 7’s return.

In closing, whereas the title of this piece refers to “cracking the case”, so far I admittedly stay a bit baffled as to precisely why the rear digicam array cowl spontaneously shattered. That stated, Ars Technica protection I got here throughout in my analysis contained an fascinating quote:

These specialised smartphone glass panels improve scratch resistance by constructing stress into the glass. We don’t know the producer of Google’s digicam glass, however a Corning engineer explains the overall course of on this Scientific American article, saying, “There’s a layer of compressive stress, then a layer of central pressure, the place the glass needs to press out, then one other layer of compressive stress.” When you mess one thing up in your glass method and these layers aren’t in an ideal steadiness, at some point the glass will simply go “pop” and also you’ll get these outward mini explosions.

Right here’s extra background data from the Ars Technica piece:

We’ve seen this precise downside a number of occasions earlier than on the planet of smartphones. Samsung was hit with this concern in 2016 on the Galaxy S7 and once more in 2021 the Galaxy S20, each of which kicked off class-action lawsuits.

Additional, the Google scenario isn’t restricted to the Pixel 7; person experiences recommend that the Pixel 7 Professional and Pixel 7a are equally . Nor did the corporate seemingly repair the issue with the successor Pixel 8 era of merchandise, both; right here’s simply one in every of quite a few case examine examples of cracking points (and sure, Google as soon as once more appears to be initially balking at proudly owning as much as overlaying the repairs beneath guarantee). Thankfully, my different (Verizon-enabled “Snow”) Pixel 7 hasn’t exhibited the identical habits, no less than but; its manufacturing facility guarantee additionally expired in mid-July, however its Most popular Care prolonged guarantee protection is from Google, so hope springs everlasting.

Might of us who dropped their telephones attempt to rip-off Google into repairing them without spending a dime, too? Maybe. Google’s preliminary reticence is due to this fact no less than considerably comprehensible. However quoting a phrase I’ve additionally utilized in loads of prior writeups, the place there’s smoke there’s often fireplace, and there appears to be lots of smoke right here. I hope Google types this example out for its Pixel 9 and future smartphone households. And if any of you will have glass-composition experience, I’d love to listen to your root-cause theories within the feedback!

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Imaginative and prescient Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the corporate’s on-line publication.

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