Greeks best in the world – at, er, breaking their mobile phones Insurance is dull. Mobile phone insurance is doubly so, to spice it up insurance company SquareTrade has published figures for how good people in different countries are at using their phones without falling over. It transpires that the Poles and Belgians are very good, while the Greeks and Italians are the most likely to have …
Apple keep going on and on and on about how wonderful it is that their devices are encased in aluminium. But this is marketing nonsense. The bit of the phone that is protected by being made of strong aluminium is the case -- the one bit that doesn't matter. The very fact that it takes an impact so well means that it is transferring the force to the screen and the internal components. Drop a plastic phone, and the plastic absorbs the impact. But it looks less shiny and expensive.
Over the last few decades, drivers haven't been made safer by using more and more rigid metal in the construction of cars' bodywork.
As a daily subway traveler in Athens I can confirm i daily see phones with cracked screens, people dropping their phone (only to sometimes sub-sequentially see it getting stepped on by passers-by) and other such fun stuff.
Best i saw was this guy who stopped the metro-doors from closing by putting his iPhone between the doors. Sure enough, the doors opened again :)
I work in Greece every summer as a DJ and can say that most Greeks have a ropey looking iPhone.
I've never smashed a phone until I dropped my Galaxy S3 a few months back shattering the screen. I've dropped it a million times on the carpet at home in the UK but one explanation is that Greeks don't carpet floors like we do.
Phone + Terracotta floor tiles = Insurance claim.
That is reserved for us 'Lefties' who have to struggle in a Right-handed world.
People (inclusing us lefties) are just clumsy by nature. Everyone is to a lesser or greater extent.
Now if all the phone users who dropeed and smashed their phones were just lefties then it would be (IMHO) acceptable to use the term 'Cackhanded'.
"Dr Louise Newson, a British GP, said: “I’ve seen a lot of mobile-related injuries in my surgery in the last 12 months, mostly from people tripping or bumping into something because they’ve been distracted by their smartphone. Some of the injuries are quite nasty.”
There's no mobile phone insurance in Greece, just some extended warranties which include screen replacement and have zero take-up. People in Greece can't afford health or car insurance, let alone phone insurance. So there's no relevant data set they could possibly be using.
So there's two possibilities:
1) they're looking at sales of replacement parts. These will certainly be very high in Greece because people hold on to their phones for a long time before upgrading (the iPhone 4/4s is still the dominant handset). Most phones were acquired via carrier subsidies, which all but disappeared in the last few years.
2) The source of the data set is their collective posterior.
Either way the don't care about accurate analysis, they just their puff piece published to get some publicity for Square Trade.
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