Does A “MIL-STD Drop Test” Phone Case Actually Mean Anything?

Author: Michael Crider / Source: reviewgeek.com

With phones getting ever bigger, more slippery, and more expensive, you might be looking for an extra-tough case to protect your investment. Will spending extra money on a “MIL-STD” model actually do anything though?

Before we dig in, let’s make sure the very thing we’re talking about is clear.

MIL-STD refers to a series of standards set by the United States military, designed to create uniform, dependable items for soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The term encompasses a lot of things, including manufacturing processes and interfaces, but the part of the documentation most often applied to consumer goods is MIL-STD-810G, which is a series of tests designed to measure equipment’s specific durability. You can download a PDF copy of the document here—if you’re the “likes to read dry government documents” type of person that is (no judgement, we read it).

The 810G documentation (“G” meaning the latest revision, from 2012) is further broken down into tests for specific scenarios. Different portions of the standard are applied to different aspects of a device, like resistance to high and low temperature, ability to keep out liquids and vibration, or even resist gunshots and explosions. And each section starts with a reference to “tailoring,” meaning the intended purpose and use of the device itself.

The MIL-STD 810G standard lays out the requirements and methodology for each test. For phone cases, the most applicable portion of the document is section 516.6, “Shock.” This is the one that’s most commonly advertised as “certified” for rugged phone cases. Quoting from the section:

Shock tests are performed to:

• a. provide a degree of confidence that material can physically and functionally withstand the relatively infrequent, non-repetitive shocks encountered in handling, transportation, and service environments. This may include an assessment of the overall materiel system integrity for safety purposes in any one or all of the handling, transportation, and service environments;
• b. determine the materiel’s fragility level, in order that packaging may be designed to protect the materiel’s physical and functional integrity; and
• c. test the strength of devices that attach materiel to platforms that can crash.

The tests include eight different categories, from “functional mode” (can the device still work when it’s encountering the kind of bumps and drops you can expect while actually operating it?) all the way to “catapult launch” (will this thing still work after we’ve strapped it to a fighter jet and launched it off an aircraft carrier?). Obviously, some are more applicable than others to the specific use case of your cell phone.

The section that seems to be almost universally applied to rugged phone cases is Procedure IV, Transit Drop. This part of the documentation says that any equipment weighing less than 100 pounds should be test-dropped from a height of 48 inches (“carrying…

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