I've dropped fluids on my phones before, and having them be waterproof-ish is quite nice.

I also used to live in a very rainy location, and having your phone be usable without finding shelter is vital.

and while your environment may be conducive to juggling a fragile glass rectangle that will become inoperable from a splash of wet, there's quite a lot of agriculture, fishing, and forestry enthusiasts who really cannot use a device with such narrow limits on use.

Current gen smartphones are designed to fail, and a bit of waterproofing certainly is not going to fix that...just making the point that your 14 years are pretty darn small of an observation window if you can't see a use for it by some, at least.

@Luci for Chai Tea I just saw someone comment that Fairphone was hopeless because it wasn't immersion resistant and like, excuse me internet person, 10-15 years ago none of them except twice-as-expensive models for rough use were.

But yeah, if you plop phones all the time or want peace of mind, know yourself I guess, and don't buy a Fairphone.

I didn't expect to find people clumsier than me! I do it in dreams too, just not in real life.

Are you using Fairphone now?

If so, what network? And can it do wifi calls?

@zens

yes, and I am disagreeing with you on scope and perspective.

You dismissed the usability (of environmental protection, specifically waterproofing) outside a specific niche that you are not part of.

I am saying that your niche - not needing environmental durability - is a symptom of the throw-away consumer mindset. Arguing against durability hurts us all, even if you have zero immediate need for the robustness.

Correlary, nobody argues about portable outdoor-use tools of other sorts (lights, cameras, chainsaw/trimmers, lawn mower, even professional test gear that is for use outside a lab environment) not needing to be durable enough for their intended operating environment (the out of doors). But in the smartphone niche, despite the fact that humans are water based (and simple sweat can kill a phone)...

If all phones had waterproofing and end-user repairability, it would be a net benefit to the people, so any argument against it will become the reason why nobody can have it. We saw it with the move to nonphysical keyboards, and we've seen it with the bandwidth wars (literally taking the cheap 2/3g nets offline to push adoption of expensive fragile end user devices).