Jeff Bezos Wants To Put an Airbag In Your iPhone

theodp writes "Don't want to pay Apple $199 to repair the cracked screen of the $199 iPhone you dropped? Neither, apparently, does Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. A patent application made public Thursday lists Bezos as an inventor of 'a system and method for protecting devices from impact damage,' which proposes using airbags, springs, and even a jet propulsion system to keep your iPhones, iPads, and other portable devices safe and out of the clutches of the Genius Bar. Let's hope there's an API — those gas cartridges could be a game-changer for fart apps!"

Re:Dumbest idea awarded to Jeff

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are certainly designs and materials that are better and worse in terms of how well they make this tradeoff; but one problem with impact resistance(abundantly seen in recent trends in phone design) is that a number of the things that make a phone good at resisting impact ironically make it feel like cheap shit in use.

Your basic free-on-contract snap-on-ABS-modular-carrier-branding-panels-and-not-especially-tight-tolerances dumbphone is actually pretty good at being resistant to drops. The ABS flexes, absorbing some of the energy, the battery door pops off and goes flying, and the LCD is a dinky little module loosely held behind a plastic cover by a ribbon cable and a couple of pegs. You can practically feel the thing flex when you try to use it; but it simply flexes and springs back when dropped.

Your canonical contemporary smartphone, by contrast, is designed to feel like a solid 2001-but-with-a-touchscreen slab of the future. No flex, no wasted volume that acts as a 'crumple zone', toughened glass that is much more scuff resistant than plastic; but shatters rather than denting/scratching, etc. Feels impenetrable in use; but inelastic collisions are painful...