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This is the AirX, a phone case that's designed to protect your phone the same way a modern car protects its passengers. Where just like a car has a crumple zone, the AirX has this compression skeleton that absorbs and redirects energy away from the phone's core. And then just like cars have airbags, this case has an isolated air chamber that wraps all the way around it. Which together, Rhino Shield says these two systems reduce the impact your phone experiences by up to 81%. Which, if true, would make this one of the most shockabsorbing cases ever made? But here's the problem. How do you even go about proving something like that?
Our normal drop tests, which we've been conducting for over a decade now, can only tell you if the glass cracked or if the features on the phone remain functional. But what they don't show you is what's happening on the inside to the solder points, the camera modules, or the tiny chips where we've seen it firsthand. A phone that technically works on drop day can completely fail to even turn on just a few months later. So, we partnered up with Rhino Shield on this video and leveled up our drop rig where we got our hands on this. This is a tiny industrial-grade accelerometer that works just like the accelerometer in your phone. That little sensor that knows when you tilt it to rotate your
screen. But instead of topping out at 20 gs or 20 times the force of gravity, this one can measure up to 5,000 gs. And paired with an oscilloscope, it lets us capture 150,000 data points every second. Which means for the first time ever, we'll actually be able to see how much force the phone takes during a drop and find out if this case really does what it claims and how it compares to Apple's own silicone case. Now, while we are going to be dropping an iPhone both with and without the AirX, in the name of science, we first wanted to test it where the case was the only variable. And to do that, we had to go out and CNC this dummy iPhone with a mega safe cutout to match the weight of a real
iPhone within 2 g. But unlike a real iPhone that has glass, adhesives, and internal components that can flex and absorb impact, this aluminum block is completely rigid, which means when it drops, it'll leave all the shock absorbing to the cases themselves. But first things first, we need our reference points to see how much shock a drop delivers with no case at all. In three, two, one. Oh man, that sounded brutal. Our oscilloscope registered a whopping 5200 gs of peak force, which was so violent that it actually ripped the accelerometer clean off of its mount. But as dramatic as that drop looked, the real story is in the data, where you can
see that the first impact happens in less than 260 micros secondsonds. That's 0.0000.26 seconds where the dummy phone just gets a sledgehammer spike of force. Okay, so now that we know what a raw unprotected drop looks like, let's see how things go using Apple's own silicone case. All right, that silicone case cut the impact by more than half. The oscilloscope showed a peak of around 2300 gs, which is down from 5200 with no case. And the reason is clear. Instead of that spike being over in just 240 microconds, Apple's silicone case stretched it out to about 400 microconds, where by spreading that impact over more time, the peak force was reduced, giving any phone inside the case a much better chance of surviving. But now comes the moment of truth, where
unlike Apple's silicone case, which is really just some padding, the AirX has that compression skeleton in the corners with an isolated air chamber that wraps all the way around. You can literally feel it when you squeeze the case where it compresses in and out. So, I'm excited to see how this thing will actually do. In three, two, one. Wow. I think you were able to hear the difference. RSOcope showed just 83gs of peak force, which is less than a third of the force Apple's case took and more than six times lower than dropping the block by itself. That is a crazy reduction in force. And if you look at the graph, you can see exactly why. where instead of the quick 240 microcond spike we saw with no case or even the
400 microconds with Apple's silicone case, the AirX stretched the impact over,260 microconds or fold three times longer than Apple's case. This is exactly what a good car safety system aims to do in a crash where it spreads the impact out over time where in this case quite literally means less force ultimately making it into the phone inside. Now, we didn't want to stop there, partly because we needed a larger sample size, and partly because we also wanted to see how these cases hold up after repeated drops. Where with Apple's silicone case, the first few drops looked decent right around 2200gs, but then the numbers started to climb up here and there. On drop number four, for example, it spiked
to 3,300 gs, and by drop 7, the corner of the case had split open. It was literally falling apart. So, I had to throw in the towel. The RX, on the other hand, stayed impressively stable drop after drop. It was just kissing the steel versus slamming into it with every reading landing between 750 and around 850GS. And after all 10 drops, the case itself only had light scuffing to show for it. You can literally see the difference between the two cases, which actually lines up with Rhino Shield's claim that the Airax can withstand something like over 24,000 tumbles before cracking. But it is time. Time to drop a real iPhone both with and without a case. So, first up is the iPhone all by itself.
So, that was actually one of the cleanest trials we got with the bare iPhone where the force spiked to about 2600 gs, which you know, while brutal is nowhere near the 5200 gs from the CNC block. So clearly despite weighing the same, the glass, the frame, and the other components in the iPhone was helping it absorb some of the shock and spread it out more gradually over time. But let's see how the iPhone does with the AirX on this time. All right, so we get a peak of 771gs on the AX, which is surprisingly about the same as with the CNCed iPhone. I was honestly expecting a much lower peak value here since the iPhone clearly absorbs some of the impact compared to
the metal block. But it looks like at this point the AX is just doing all the heavy lifting to where the phone's own absorption is negligible. Of course, just like before, we didn't want to stop at one drop. We ran multiple trials where with the AX, nine out of the 10 trials that we got were clean and consistent with only one outlier that we tossed out because the reading came in unusually low. But with the bare iPhone, it was a different story. While we did get a few clean runs, the phone started taking damage as the drops piled on where by the eighth drop, the glass had finally cracked and then our rig also threw us a curveball. The cable started snagging mid drop and sent the iPhone
curse growing through the air. The footage obviously looks absolutely insane with shards of glass exploding everywhere. There was even a spark shooting off the titanium frame. But as far as the data goes, this drop was useless. So, focusing only on the clean trials, the Air X averaged 762Gs across the drops, while the naked iPhone averaged 2,674 gs, which is about 3.5 times more force hitting the phone without the case compared to the Air X. So, clearly, this case is the real deal. Although, I do have to say it does add some size to the phone. It's basically wrapping your phone in a bubble, which makes it a little bit wider than some people may want. So, for anyone who wants something a little bit slimmer, Rhino Shield also
sent out their solid X case, which, you know, while it doesn't absorb as much impact as the AirX, in our test with the aluminum block, it still cut the force nearly in half compared to Apple's silicone case, where it spread the impact over 980 micro seconds, which to me makes it a really nice middle ground between the ultimate protection and having a design that's a little bit slimmer. But there you have it. I think that's conclusive proof that the AX lives up to its claims with real data to back it up. I'll be dropping all the links and info you need down below where using the discount code PhoneBuff, you can also get 10% off the cases. But anyways, that is it for me in this
video. Big thanks to Rhino Shield for sponsoring this whole experiment and helping us push our drop rig further than ever before. Thank you guys for watching and as always, I'll see you in the very next episode.
