Perhaps they should. By the way, which device or UI that you worked on is better than the iPhone?
Don't get me started
Any UI that I've done over the past 25 years is better in many ways. For one thing, I don't like hidden gestures like the two-finger iPhone div/textfield scroll. For another, not having a way to quickly scroll to the middle of their own PDF manual is just plain sadistic to a user.
As for devices, I've designed parts of portable casino gaming devices that are used in fairly harsh conditions (lots of spilled drinks, for example), and worked for the past ten years with touchscreen handhelds for field techs. I and others were doing stuff like fingertip scrolling long before Apple figured it out in mid-2006.
I haven't read anything anywhere in Apple's marketing or sales material to suggest the iPhone is said to be water resistant or water proof. So you should not expect it to be or treat it as such.
It's a phone. It's an iPod. It's going to get used outdoors.
One of the whole points of going with a touchscreen, versus buttons, is that you should be able to avoid having as many physical moisture penetration points.
They want to know if you let the iPhone get wet enough for water to enter the inside which would be something that should void the hardware warranty.
Other phones put the detector under the battery where raindrops can't trigger them. Apple, not having a removeable battery, had to place them where store clerks could see them. So they placed them virtually exposed at the two most obvious ingress points, the jack and dock connector.
Knowing that these were vulnerable areas, a good designer of a supposedly upperclass device would've used a waterproof jack, and set up a water resistant connector assembly.
Even if they wanted to go super cheap, visual vanity prevented Apple from at least supplying basic plugs to cover these openings.
It's classic form over function, at the expense of the consumer's warranty.
