Heck, I was carrying around an original iPhone for several months before public availability and I'd not even been there a year. I don't see how age plays into it, and time with company *shouldn't* either. The question is whether you are testing the device in real-world environments and filing bug reports / collecting logs.

When a device becomes publicly available, millions of people are hammering on it very quickly - you want to find issues before that point, when they can be fixed. People carrying prototypes is nothing new, every phone vendor does this because there's no substitute for actually living on the device.

Hugo