Cleaning a touch screen #howto

Recently I was asked if I had put a screen protector on my tablet … nope.  The job I did on my wife’s old phone and my old captivate tells me that trying to do the same on something over 2x as large would just be disastrous.  So I’m going ‘regimental’ (piping joke) on my screen now.

Kinda sucks as I’ve noticed a teeny, tiny little speck of a scratch on my nexus… grr.  But for my tablet (which has Gorilla Glass) I’m not so concerned, it’s just constantly dirty (you might see in the pic I took in a post earlier today).

you can almost lift my fingerprint from this image!

So, it was ironic that when I was answering about my screen protector I just found an article on how to clean your phone screen.

It’s not that bad a read… pretty basic, but in case you didn’t know.  And I’m sure there are a lot that just don’t know.  But I grew up working in electronics stores, so I’ve always got the questions like “what should I use to clean the screen”.

What do I use?  I keep a micro-fibre cloth always handy (in my tablet’s sleeve I have a large and a small), or a sunglasses cloth in my car.

With those it’s usually enough to get rid of most of the smudges.  For any deeper cleaning I give it a bit of a hot breath to mist up the screen a little and apply an infinitesimal amount of pressure.

When I’ve got a particularly bad smudge, or after my son’s played with it for some time I’ll get into proper cleaning mode.  This is pretty much the same, but this time I’ll go and get a water spritzer (when I bought a screen shield previously they had that little spritz bottle, I just fill it with water).

You’d want just a tiny amount of misted water and then just use the cloth and massage the areas in a circular pattern.  Keep doing that until you see nothing left, and then use a dry bit of the cloth and wipe it down dry.

That’s about it.

What shouldn’t you do?

• Use your shirt… unless you know it’s clean and it’s a fibre that won’t scratch.
• Use too much water… don’t want to ruin the device
• Use soaps or cleaners… some of them can eat the class

Okay, that being said, one of our supporters for the blog is BodyGuardz who gives you a 15% discount if you use our code.  So… if you don’t want to clean, go get a guard for it.  But you’ll need to clean that occasionally too.

Any tips you guys have?