Some things drive marketing men and women round the bend. For the hard working folks at Samsung, mention of bends is liable to do just that right now. After making fun of the iPhone 6 Plus for the way it behaved under physical duress, the poor folk at Samsung have found themselves embroiled in the sort of slanging match that is the very antithesis of a polished, well-orchestrated marketing campaign.
It seems the S6 Edge has been shown to buckle under pressure – so much for all that ‘curved not bent’ and #bendgate Twitter fun (LG got in on the Apple bashing act back in September, too, as you may well recall).
Here we go again… #BendGate https://t.co/hxqWL7F7U0
— Lappari (@LappariCom) April 3, 2015
Having boomeranged themselves into a corner, the folk at Samsung are now desperately trying to find a way out of their current embarrassment. And in the time-honoured fashion, they have resorted to blaming the messenger. More practically they have insisted the test conditions, which showed that their casing was, in fact, inferior to that of the iPhone 6 Plus, be re-examined. It is the sort of squabble that does no-one any good, and from our perspective, it is good to see that the Apple marketing team have chosen to simply rise above the furore.
The tests were carried out by Square Trade, who put a variety of competing devices through their paces. The crunch test (forgive the pun) was intended to simulate the forces impacting on a device should it be in someone’s back pocket when they sat on it. Their results have been the talk of the tech community for some time and are summarised here:
• Both the S6 Edge and iPhone 6 Plus became deformed when subjected to a force of 110lb (50kg). At this pressure, the screen on Samsung’s phone cracked, but the iPhone’s did not
• HTC’s One M9 did not bend until 120lbs of pressure was applied, at which point it collapsed completely
• The S6 Edge’s catastrophic breaking point was 149lb
• The iPhone 6 Plus only stopped working at the point where 179lb of pressure was applied
Needless to say the physical focus of the test has little if anything to do with the actual functionality of the different devices – in terms of camera spec, battery life etc. But it seems that the phone market is shaped as much by the sort of aesthetic consideration and generation of brand loyalty that Apple does so well as it is by what goes on under the casing.
In the meantime, we’re left wondering just what sort of a backside the typical smartphone user is expected to have. All the images that we’ve seen attached this story has a rather solid looking stylus applying pressure to the devices. It is always possible that Square Trade did their tests by a more organic means – although quite what that might be is anyone’s guess. Suffice to say that the difference of a few pounds of pressure in a lab test is not a great way to measure what happens when someone leaves their phone in their back pocket. The real test would be to see which device users would be more likely to sit on their device in the first place, you certainly won’t be able to play your super jackpot party games. On this evidence, it might be Samsung users.
