Slide-on cases may cause iPhone 4 back panel to crack

The iPhone 4 is the only phone in the world that features a full glass back panel, and although that makes for a pleasing user experience to the sight and touch, a full glass back panel also has a major flaw — it is very fragile.

The front and back panels of the iPhone 4 are made from a chemically toughened aluminosilicate glass which in numerous advertisements, Apple has claim is extremely difficult to scratch. It now appears that this claim doesn’t stand up in the real world.

So naturally, you’d want to protect your all-glass iPhone 4 with a case. And as with these things, there are a plethora of designs to choose from, but it seems that one type of casing might actually do more harm than good to your iPhone 4.

Quoting a report from GDGT:

Apple has apparently found that non-bumper style cases — specifically those that slide onto the iPhone 4, which are occasionally prone to particulate matter getting caught between the rear of the phone and the case — can cause unexpected scratching that could quickly develop into full-on cracking or even much larger fracturing of the entire rear pane of glass. To put it another way: Apple is afraid you might buy a standard slide-on iPhone case, put it on your phone, and then discover the next time you take it off that the entire back of your device has been shattered by no fault of your own.

The same report also claims that Apple has stopped sales of nearly all third-party iPhone 4 cases from its stores in the US (on Apple’s online store, sales of these third-party cases where blocked temporarily but have now resumed). Internally, the writer has been made to believe that the iPhone team has grown to be very concerned by this issue with slide-on cases, and has created a lab and large new test program specifically to investigate this further.

So to all you iPhone 4 owners out there, if you’re using a slide-on case, you be be looking to replace that case with one that’s more like Apple’s bumper case.

[source]
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