One of the first reactions many people had to the iPhone 8’s glass sandwich design was to grimace at the thought of dropping it but, weirdly, it’s surprisingly hard to drop compared to its predecessors.
Although glass backs aren’t a completely new iPhone design choice (the iPhone 4 had a glass back years ago) the iPhone 8 and iPhone X are the first iPhones in awhile to sport a glass back—the “jet black” iPhone 7 models weren’t glass but super polished aluminum.
One of the surprising benefits of the glossy glass back is that, despite how concerned you might be about dropping it, the glass surface is so much easier to grip than the matte aluminum body design of the iPhone 5, 6, and 7 product lines. The iPhone 6 and 7, especially, were particularly slippery and felt almost like they were coated in graphite dust as your hand slid so smoothly over the matte finish.
The glass body of the iPhone 8 looks like it would be unbearably slippery, but it sticks to your hand like it’s coated in glue.
The iPhone 8, on the other hand, sticks so well that you can hold the phone with an open hand at a nearly 90 degree angle and it doesn’t slide off. Think that’s hyperbole? The photo above is all 5 ounces and change of my baby-tablet-sized iPhone 8 Plus hanging at a precarious angle just by the friction between my hand and the glass back.
If that view isn’t revealing enough for you, here’s another photo of me “holding” the phone with a perfectly flat palm against the back at a steep angle:
What’s interesting is that even when you tilt your hand to a complete 90 degree angle such that the phone should fall straight down, it doesn’t fall straight down.
The grip between the pads of your fingers and/or palm is so strong that, instead, it slowly slides down like tar running down your hand. Unless you tilt your hand more than 90 degrees to force…
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