November 6, 2015
FUN WAYS TO KILL A SMARTPHONE
Smartphones are ruining everything. No one talks to each other any more, kids are spending more time on their phones than they do sleeping, and they are permanently damaging our spines. Clearly, something must be done and the only sensible course of action is that we immediately destroy them all. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun doing it.
Take the latest trend in holiday activities, for example, extreme phone-pinching. Not to be mistaken for phone theft, phone-pinching is a two-player activity that involves one participant filming while another holds their smartphone between finger and thumb. The smartphone is then dangled over something that you really shouldn’t dangle your phone over, such as a great height, river or sewer grate. Naturally, as this video demonstrates, things sometimes go a bit wrong.
Taking risks without reward is fun enough, but risks with reward? So much better. That’s where a new app called ‘Send Me To Heaven’ comes in – or at least, it would if Apple hadn’t just pulled it from their store. The idea is very simple: reach the top of the leaderboard by throwing your phone as high into the air as you can. You can catch it on the way down of course, if you’re boring. Surely it’s far more fun to see several hundred dollars of cutting-edge technology shatter all over the floor. Also in development is an app inspiringly entitled ‘Send Me To Hell’, whereby you win by dropping your phone the furthest. Oh goody.
The pinnacle of any challenge is to become so good at it that you turn professional. We’re not sure whether there are any professional phone-destroyers, but there’s certainly a few world champion phone-throwers. That’s because mobile phone throwing has become a sport in Finland (the country that also gave us the wife-carrying event). There does not seem to be anything happening next year unfortunately, but you can use that time to practice because registration is open for the March 2017 event.
Of course, you don’t need to rely on gravity to kill a smartphone. There are thousands of ways to dispose of the dreadful things. You could torture one to death in the name of consumer reviews, or, and this is my personal favorite, throw it into a volcano and then poke it with a stick, all in the name of science.
