New phone just dropped.

Not too long ago, our reporter Masanuki Sunakoma stumbled upon a stand in the Tokyo subway that coated his phone with a substance that gave it a hardness of 9H on the Mohs scale, which is only one step below diamond. The whole process only took 10 minutes and cost 3,000 yen (US$21) but boasts a high degree of scratch resistance for six years, which should take Masanuki well into his next model…

However, only a few days later as he was getting out of his car he dropped his phone. It all happened so fast  that he can’t quite remember how he dropped it, but he remembers fumbling with it in his hand and the feeling of getting punched in the face as he heard it slam against the ground face down.

It’s important to note that this wasn’t some kind of cornball test he came up with. In fact, it was still too early to even think about doing something like this. Masanuki got his coating on the evening of 31 May and right after the staff warned him that it wouldn’t fully harden for 16 days, so he had to be extra careful until then.

▼ Extra… Careful…

The day that his phone hit the asphalt was 12 June, only 12 days and some change into the hardening process.

To make matters worse, this parking lot that Masanuki had chosen seemed lined with an asphalt heated in the fires of Hell. The chunks of gravel were so jagged and coarse that they created lush valleys of plant life in between them. If you had tasked our reporter with finding the worst possible blacktop to drop his phone onto, this would probably be it.

His phone was just like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, only a few days from retirement but thrust into a potentially fatal battle. Still… Masanuki couldn’t see the screen, so maybe just like Danny Glover it would emerge all right in the end.

On the other hand, a pessimistic Danny Glover fan would see the beloved actor as the asphalt and the phone as Predator 2. Although on paper the Predator 2 seems like the superior combatant, it was still in training and not yet seasoned enough to overcome the gritty determination and reliability of Danny “The Ground” Glover.

Conflicting thoughts raced through his mind as he slowly reached for it.

▼ Masanuki: “The coating wasn’t finished…”

▼ Masanuki: “But it was almost finished…”

▼ Masanuki: “Like 75 percent finished…”

▼ Masanuki: “…”

▼ Masanuki: “No!”

▼ Masanuki: “No!!!”

▼ Masanuki: “NOOOOOOOOO!!!”

After the shock and horror of the discovery subsided, Masanuki could only give a defeated chuckle. That’s how life goes sometimes, so he decided to move forward and look into screen repair services. After a quick search he found that it would cost about 50,000 yen ($360) or the price of an Asian vacation for his colleague Go Hattori.

Masanuki certainly couldn’t blame the fine people at that stand either. They had warned him to be careful for 16 days and he couldn’t even do that. Moreover, these kinds of treatments are effective against scratches but less so against impacts. It’s like Bruce Lee said: True strength isn’t in being hard – it’s being able to flow like water.

But until we get liquid smartphones, this is the best we got.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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