I walked into a Samsung store recently to get a glimpse of that new Galaxy S7 And S7 Edge since it is one of the latest buzz in the mobile world. It is kind of tempting for me to get personally. Apparently one of its new features that is highlighted is the phone’s waterproof features. Now personally speaking I don’t understand he exact technicalities of this other than the marketing materials saying that it is “IP68 certified” which apparently means it can go like one meter deep into water for about thirty minutes. This doesn’t really concern me too much but my assumption is people would be able to take it swimming or something like that to shoot underwater shots.
To my surprise, while I was in the store I heard Samsung employees saying how the phone is indeed waterproof. However, it was explicitly said that it wouldn’t be the case if you were to go into water with salt or chlorine. So basically, I guess you wouldn’t really be able to take it swimming for a long period of time anyways. I definitely didn’t see any fine prints like that in the presentations I saw.
It made me think how we often immediately assume that keywords like “waterproof” automatically means you can like throw it into a lake of water and not worry about it getting damaged. Basically, you can be care free with these kinds of scenarios. But as shown here it’s not quite like that in every scenario. This should make you think whenever you pay a lot of money for products that seem to have all these crazy features. Like in this case, given the choice I would probably opt not to have the “waterproof” feature if it meant paying less.