How To Clean Your Smartphone ?

Is a Smartphone Dirty ? Does it Require Cleaning?

Smartphones are the ones that stay with us almost all through the day from the moment you wake till you doze off in your bed at night. Weirdly, some people even carry them to the loo (including myself. Come on, who doesn’t want to kill time on the mobile phone.) For a very long time, I wasn’t aware of the fact that my mobile could carry 18times more bacteria than a toilet handle, serious disease-causing bacteria.

It is inevitable to leave our phones back in our daily life. We cleanse ourselves by bathing regularly and wearing washed clothes. Do we even care to clean our smartphones? Should they too bath with us, boasting the high Ingress Protection ratings for dust and water resistance, they too can literally. But not necessarily, periodic wipes and cleaning and some precautions can keep your smartphones as clean as you wish it was.

Cleaning Kit

There are a variety of cleaning kits for the display, mobile available in the market, but do you need to spend on them to take care of your devices. Well, there are more easy and cost-effective ways to do them. Make a kit of your own. Gather a bunch of cotton swabs, some toothpicks, a lint-free piece of cloth (ideally microfibre cloth) and some solution that we will tell you how to make. Disinfectants are easy to prepare and use. Mix equal amount of water with Isopropyl Alcohol and store it in a spray bottle.

If you want to go the organic route and can stand the smell of vinegar, mix vinegar with distilled water in equal quantities. A tin of compressed air can save you a lot of time and risk trying to get rid of the grime and gink piled up on the speaker vents, ports and cracks between screen and body.

Steps to clean a smartphone

Not all smartphones are the same at least in the exteriors but cleaning them does not differ much. We have general instructions to possibly clean every Android or Apple smartphone in the galaxy.

• Firstly, remove your smartphone from any sort of casing, switch it off and place it on a clean surface which is not rough on the smartphone too.
• Start with the air blower if you are available with. Point the blower into ports, mainly charging port, headphone port, and the main speaker outlet. Make sure most of the grime fly out. If not use a toothpick very gently without causing damage to the device. Use them on any place like the crack between the screen and body, the earpiece and make sure all the gunk is removed.
• Now is the turn of the disinfectant. Use the solution which you have handy on the microfibre cloth and softly wipe the smartphone starting from the outside slowly moving inwards. Cover all of the surface area except the openings like ports, button cutouts.
• Wipe the extra solution with the dry end of the cloth. Use cotton swabs similarly on delicate areas and places not reachable by the microfibre cloth.
• Also, wipe the inner side of the casing before putting it on.

Precautions

• Alcohol is not very good on the glass surface as it is with plastic or metal. Most of the phones have an oleophobic coat on its glass to prevent smudges on it. The extensive use of alcohol-based disinfectants tends to dissolve the coat itself. Apple even recommends not to use alcohol on their smartphones. But with our past experiences, a small amount of alcohol disinfectant isn’t any harm.
• Do not spray the solution directly on the smartphone for any reason. Because the excess solution might run to the corners and drip via cracks to enter the internals.
• Use hand sanitizers after a meal to prevent passing on bacteria to your smartphone.
• Do not use rough cloth as that even may cause scratches on the surface.
• Do the cleaning process is a dust free place to avoid hassles of cleaning and recleaning.

Conclusion

Getting your smartphone dirty is literally unavoidable. But taking care of your device and cleaning them periodically is possible. Simply use a cotton swab or microfibre to wipe off your phone once in a while and follow the deep cleaning steps once a week or so to maintain your phone bacteria free.