“Rugged” Phones Are Bullshit

This is a Samsung Galaxy S5 Active that fell 3 feet off a cooler onto a harder dirt surface. The owner of this phone, Wes Siler, decided over on Indefinitely Wild to tell the world why “rugged phones are bullshit.”

It’s nice that Samsung has now developed waterproof phones. This makes life easier when you spill your water, it falls out of your pocket into the toilet (ladies…) or you have to ‘walk a mile both ways in the rain and snow’. However it doesn’t meet Siler’s standards:

“The IP67 standard is adequate for those scenarios, but not real abuse in the outdoors where a phone may experience anything from being left in a sodden backpack for days on end, to being submerged in whitewater. Any device intended for real outdoors use should be certified to IPX8, plain and simple.”

In addition to fragile hardware, Siler also comments on the software that comes loaded onto newer phones. He uses Samsung’s fitness apps as one example:

“Samsung’s own fitness apps are barely able to inaccurately count your steps and include no substantial dietary insights or ability to track your weightlifting in the gym. If you can do better for free in the Play Store, then why burden customers with your shitty software? Save the development cost and give users a pure Android experience.

To read more of Wes Siler’s frustrations with newer phones and how he decides to fix his, you can read the post here. If this piques your interest, you can also check out the phone case with built in tools that we wrote about here.

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