We’ve all had it happen at one point or another. There you are, minding your own business, phone in hand, when suddenly you feel the phone slip from your hand only to watch it land face down on the ground. You stare at it for a minute before deciding that you’re going to have to find out eventually whether your phone nailed the landing unscathed or totally obliterated. You may feel more confident about things if you have a case on your phone. I know I did when this very situation happened to me a few of days ago.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky.
Landing on concrete, mere centimeters away from the relative safety of grass, my Galaxy S7 Edge’s screen was destroyed. While “protected” with a case, the case clearly wasn’t protective enough. Not wanting to take away from the whole edge "experience", I opted for a slimmer case when I first got the phone. Staring at my intricately shattered display, I certainly regretted such a decision – particularly because I ended up turning off the edge featured shortly after I got the phone anyway. The only experience I managed to keep was accidental palm touches from time to time.
The situation leading up to the fall was almost comical. I was walking my son out the door to send him off to school just a minute before my usual alarm went off telling me it was time to leave. When my alarm starting ringing in my pocket, I pulled the phone out to turn off the alarm and fwip! There it went. My son and I started at it for a minute before I picked it up and surveyed the damage.
Lesson number one here is that perhaps looks aren’t everything and I really should have invested in a more protective case. On the other hand, I have to ask myself: What’s the point of buying a “beautiful” phone – in this case with an edged display and a glass back - if I have to cover it up with a heavy duty case to ensure its protection anyway? I suppose nobody has to do anything, but the risk of having a broken phone is much higher without such a case. Of course, there’s always the option of carrying insurance on a phone in case something happens, which I fortunately also had.
For months I had been wondering if it was of any use to continue carrying insurance on my phone. It’s been a while since I’ve broken a phone, but I decided to keep insurance because I have two younger kids and life with kids means something is bound to be damaged at some point – usually something important or expensive. So while it was perhaps a good idea for me to have kept insurance, the reason it broke had nothing to do with the kids, but rather just a random, unfortunate, and ill-timed case of butterfingers from me, the adult.
It’s still a somewhat costly deductible to replace the device, but at least I won’t have to shell out $670 for another one. Also, $10.99 per month (AT&T’s pricing) can add up. Since the last time I broke a device (May of 2015, I believe) I paid $241.78 in monthly insurance premiums. Even so, with the deductible I’m still coming out a few hundred ahead of purchasing a new S7 Edge. Additionally, the peace of mind of knowing that I’m protected in this situation (or in the case of loss/theft/water damage) is well worth the extra monthly expense for me. AT&T’s declining deductibles for people who keep insurance but haven’t made any claims in the past 6-12 months has also helped drastically lower the cost as well.
In the end, I would recommend two things to protecting your investment: a good case and/or insurance. A protective case is a good idea no matter how much a phone costs, but insurance may or may not be worth it depending on how expensive the phone is. At the very least, I would highly recommend insurance on expensive devices because you never know when your phone won’t survive that one unanticipated drop. Them’s the breaks, though.
