Phone screens and useless things

New phones are nice, but seem to be damn fragile, especially the glass screen. Some manufacturers' do demonstrate their sturdiness by dropping them, but of course they forget to mention that the way they drop them is very carefully planned and tested beforehand to minimize the risk of fracture.

Unfortunately in real life you don't do that planning before your phone drops, so risk of fracture exists. A case in point, my wife's Lumia that was dropped on tile floor (as you can see from on-screen date, this happened few weeks back, that's when the photos were taken, maybe I should write things up quicker sometimes...)

 Yes, it actually works, although the fracture makes it a bit hard to see the screen. And tiny glass shards also come off of it when using the touch screen, ouch.

Now, normally this wouldn't be worth of mentioning - get glass replaced (80€ at local shop) and that's it. What makes this a tiny bit more interesting is that I happened to have this on my desk:

This was mailed to be as a part of some advertising campaign a few weeks before phone broke. It is basically just a 5cm long stylus for using capacitive touch screen phones, with plug that fits in 3,5mm headphone jack for keeping it close to phone (the plug is kinda hard to see in photo). Just stylus, nothing else. I'm guessing you can buy these with your company logo for something like 50 cents each at 500 unit orders. So it's just cheap marketing crap. I don't even remember what the company was that sent that or what they advertised, but this thing was left laying [correct word? I always seem to mess that verb up] on my desk for some time as an example of Absolutely And Completely Useless Crap That Some Companies Think I Might Want --

-- Until it actually became useful, although only for a short while until screen got fixed. So not completely useless after all. I'll be damned.