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Crash test face-off: Will the iPhone 8 or Note 8 win?

Gadget warranty outfit SquareTrade gives Apple's latest a rather rude introduction to gravity and hard surfaces. The soiree does not go well.

Eric Mack Contributing Editor
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Eric Mack
2 min read

It might be a bad idea to throw stones in glass houses, but it's not too smart to throw the new all-glass iPhone 8 either, according to the results of SquareTrade's latest breakability tests. 

The device warranty company subjected the brand new Apple phones with their glass front and back panels to a handful of gadget torture tests and found, much as CNET did in our own drop tests, that even fancy glass has a hard time standing up to a healthy dose of gravity combined with a hard surface.

Apple says the iPhone 8's glass is the most durable ever used in a smartphone, but glass is still glass, and as the above video shows, it shattered when dropped on its face. The phone lost a chunk of of glass when dropped on its back.

"Like the Galaxy S8 and Note 8, our tests show that the all-glass iPhone 8 and 8 Plus break on the first drop on all sides," Jason Siciliano, global creative director at SquareTrade, said in a statement.

SquareTrade used its robotic torture system to give both new iPhones and the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 some harsh treatment. The company dropped the devices from 6 feet (about 183 centimeters) up, ran them through a tumbler and also put them through a new "shot drop" test meant to simulate flying off a car roof at 22 miles (35 kilometers) per hour.

Of the three phones, the iPhone 8 fared the best overall, earning a "medium risk" designation on SquareTrade's breakability scoring scale. The iPhone 8 Plus was given a "medium high risk" compared with the Note 8, which the warranty outfit calls "high risk."

The iPhone is still not indestructible, but that seems unlikely to stop millions of fans from buying the latest, That also means the world will continue to be filled with millions more countless iPhone cases.

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