Maybe you know this sickening feeling: Your smartphone slips from your hand and starts its descent toward the ground. If you’re standing in an asphalt parking lot or walking down a city sidewalk — and you don’t have your phone protected in a life-preserving case — you know what happens next.

Time seems to stand still as the phone falls toward earth. Then … Impact. Shattering glass. And a horrifying glimpse at the damage done.

Motorola beautifully captures that dreadful moment, over and over again, in a new ad for its supposedly shatterproof Droid Turbo 2, which was unveiled today.

In the techno-torture-porn video, iPhones and Androids fall to their deaths in slow-mo, with the sad parade set to the appropriately haunting strains of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

Naturally, a Droid Turbo takes the plunge as well — you’ll never guess which smartphone survives. (OK, yes, you will.)

Watch the artful destruction below. It’s a lot more stylized than your standard “take the smartphone outside and destroy it” endurance test.

https://youtu.be/JPPuWW0zi98

In search of ‘shatterproof’

While rugged cases traditionally provide your best protection against a dropped phone, there are more technologically advanced approaches. Apple is working on tiny, quick-deploying shock absorbers to protect future iPhones, and Motorola basically turned the Droid Turbo 2’s display into a smash-proof simulation of your aunt’s famous five-layer bean dip.

Motorola’s ShatterShield technology yields displays made up of five layers and “designed to absorb shock and guaranteed not to crack or shatter.” The company is putting its money where its mouth is, upping the warranty to four years for the durable new phone.

The layers include (according to Motorola’s website):

1. An exterior protective lens “with a proprietary hardcoat designed to guard against dents and abrasion.
2. An interior lens that “provides a clear protective shield that won’t crack or shatter.”
3. A dual-touch layer with a backup surface that “takes over to maintain touchscreen performance” if an impact trashes the main touch-sensitive layer.
4. A flexible AMOLED display that “absorbs shock and provides amazing picture quality.”
5. A rigid aluminum chassis that “provides structural integrity and durability.”

Apparently the ShatterShield technology is pretty effective: The new phone survived gnarly tests on New York City streets. Those videos aren’t as pretty as the stylized free-fall imagery in the ad, though.

Via: The Verge