If you have an iPhone chances are you have case. The reason for the case? There are a lot of reasons to have a case but one of the best ones is to protect the iPhone in case you drop it. The iPhone is expensive and buying a replacement iPhone is really expensive so a case makes sense for the fumbled fingered among us. Once you’ve got the iPhone in a case it is natural to start wondering just how far you could drop the thing without damage. I have an incase case and it I’m betting my iPhone owuld withstand a three foot drop with only minor damage. I say this with certainty because I dropped my iPhone about three feat and it sustained minor damage. But there was a part of me, a small prt easily overwhelmed by the part of me that likes to have money, that wondered just how far I could go. Ten feet? Fifty feet? 51 frickin’ stories? Well, that is just crazy talk.

Or is it? That is exactly what supposedly happened to a member of the MacRumors forum. According to siz he (or she) decided to test an otterbox case (with an iPhone inside) out of the window of an apartment on the 51st floor. The good news? The otterbox case is fine. The bad news, the iPhone isn’t working. Should this be a surpise? It’s easy to laugh and say “no” but let’s bust out some math.

Assume a height per story of 10 feet. That gives us a Distance=D=510 feet. Assume for a moment that this is in a vacuum then the speed at impact is given by:

v^2=2gD
or
v^2=2*(32f/s)*(510f)
Done with plugging, time for chugging:
v^2=32,640f^2/s
Take the square and you get ~180f/s which is about 123 mph. If the otterbox could fully protect an iPhone from a hit at that speed not only would the otterbox be the greatest case ever made the powers at be should look at the materials used for more mission critical things like airplane black boxes and cars.

But that isn’t a fair number.  What about wind resistance. Not having an otterbox case and a wind tunnel handy an approximation is necessary. The easiest equation to use is:
v=90*d^1/2 (where d is density)
which gives a terminal velocity of
86 m/s or 192 mph.

In this case the iPhone likely never reached terminal velocity so you can put an upper limit on how far you can drop your iPhone at somewhere under 51 stories even with an otterbox. It might only be 50 stories because while the iPhone still turned on, the screen looks like a “bar code.” IPM welcomes outside experimentation. Takes lots of pics.

It could be that siz is jerking everyone’s chain and if he is he’s doing a masterful job of it. If he really chucked the iPhone out of a window then let this be a lesson to you: don’t pitch your iPhone out of a window no matter tough you think you case is. Though perhaps there is a market for a chute deploying iPhone case which could use the accelerometer and some software tricks to decide when to deploy the phone saving shoot.

Read the thread at MacRumors.