The World's Most Indestructible Cell Phone

The best demo I saw at CES 2011 wasn't in a nice Vegas hotel or at the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was in a self-serve car wash a few miles off the strip, on a cold Thursday morning. That was where Sonim showed me its XP1300 Core cell phone, the most rugged, most indestructible cell phone in the world. We've seen the XP1300 before, but we got a whole different demo this time.
Sonim makes cell phones, but they're not designed for everyday users—they're for people who need their phones to withstand extreme heat, extreme cold, water, fire, and anything else you can throw at it. Sonim's reps told me about customers who work on oil pipelines in Russia, and in similarly hostile conditions all over the world. Those workers need cell phones that won't break, and Sonim provides them.








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The XP1300 Core is completely dust-proof, waterproof up to two meters, drop-proof up to 6.5 feet (though they dropped it from much higher, and weren't worried about it whatsoever), essentially unbreakable and unscratchable, and has a long battery and loud speaker to boot. Even after we put the phone through its battery of tests, it sounded as good as ever. Again, it's not a phone for average consumers, but for the people who need it (or for the extremely accident-prone), it's fantastic.
To prove how tough the XP1300 is, Sonim took me through a whole series of tests. Hit the slideshow above to see exactly what Sonim does to its phones, but let's just say I flinched every time they tossed the phone into the air and let it bounce onto the ground—and that was the tamest thing I saw.