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Oi, butterfingers! Drop your mobe in a pint? Hope it's not an iPhone

Samsung, Apple pocket-strokers swim with the fishes

Vids A submerged Galaxy S4 will outlast an iPhone by half a second - 18.8s versus 18.3s - but when dropped from nine feet (2.74m) it's the S4's screen that shatters.

This pointless destruction of consumer electronics comes courtesy of some insurance bods, who wanted to demonstrate something about water and electronics, and how falling a long way is bad for one's phone as well as one's body. But mostly it's just a nice video of fish and mobile phones.

Neither the Samsung Galaxy nor the Apple iPhone make any claim to waterproofing, despite the availability of coatings that permit even handsets with open ports (such as the Motorola RAZR) to provide some resistance to the ingress of liquid. Meanwhile Sony promotes its latest handsets with action shots of the gadgets safely plunging into water.

In drop tests, Sammy's Galaxy S4 shattered after falling nine feet (2.74m) onto bricks.

Both handsets do surprisingly well in the falling tests, carried out by insurance biz Protect Your Bubble: the mobes are only scuffed after five-foot (1.52m) drops onto a hard surface, although the Samsung battery case pings off a few times. The iPhone's screen remained intact right up to a 39-foot (11.9m) plummet - an experiment simulating a rooftop calamity that, if anything, could render insurance unnecessary.

Some mobile insurance policies used to be a marvellous con, as punters with trashed phones would be required to claim on their home insurance first, ensuring the mobe-specific insurance almost never paid out. The explicit removal of phones from home insurance policies has ended that practice, and these days insurance is a good idea if the cost to replace a smashed smartphone is crippling. ®

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