Skydiver's iPhone 4 survives 13,500-foot fall

A skydriver's iPhone 4 fell out of his pocket. And the thing still works. If a skydriver's iPhone keeps on ticking, what else can the device handle?

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A skydiver's iPhone survived a fall of upwards of two and a half miles. Neither the skydiver in question – nor the iPhone – are pictured here.

Well, to be honest, it all seems a little unbelievable. Your trusty Horizons blogger has an iPhone 4 that sports an impressive little crack on its backside, from when he dropped it from a height of approximately two feet. (Before that, we dropped an iPhone 3G while jogging, and watched the entire screen splinter into a patter that would have been beautiful had it not rendered the iPhone pretty much useless.)

Still, there you go: There is a guy on the Internet today named Jarrod McKinney, and he says he lost his iPhone 4 while skydiving, only to find it on a nearby roof, in working order. McKinney, who hails from Minnesota, estimates he lost the iPhone 4 at approximately 13,500 feet. Upon reaching the ground, he used a GPS app to track down the handset; later, a friend called McKinney, and to both of their surprise, the super-cracked phone began to ring.

Mike Gikas, a tech editor at Consumer Reports, told CNN that McKinney had stumbled upon the solution for the dreaded iPhone "death grip." "That's the proved method for fixing the antenna problem," Gikas said – joking, of course. He also added that it is technically possible for a piece of hardware such as the iPhone to survive such a long fall: "I think that can happen. I think water is harder to deal with than shock."

Hey, maybe the iPhone 5 will ship with some sort of skydiver resistant springy foam packaging. Last time we checked in on the (as of yet mythical) iPhone 5, the (not yet confirmed) device reached the final stage of testing, and was already being hauled around by "high level Apple and carrier executives." So said the tech site 9 to 5 Mac, which put the launch date of the iPhone 5 at September of this year.

More when we know it. In the meantime, if you're going skydiving, make sure to secure your electronic gadgetry.

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