Your Cell Phone is Grungy! Here’s How and Why You Should Clean it
How clean is your phone? No, I'm not talking about those images you don't want your parents or kids to see, I'm talking about general cleanliness.
A recent survey on YouGov revealed that most of us don't clean our phones very often. In fact, nearly half of us (47%) answered "Not Very Often" versus only 6% that said "Very Often". Why is this an issue? Well, germs and other grungy things we don't want to think about collect on our phones. We breathe on our phones, we touch our phones, then we touch our faces, or our food, or whatever and the contamination gets transferred and the next thing you know you have the flu.
Fortunately, cleaning a modern smart phone is not difficult at all. The first things you'll need is a microfiber cloth and some water. That's it for most cleanings, just gently wipe the phone surfaces down with a dampened microfiber cloth. You don't need harsh chemicals or alcohol, in fact most experts recommend NOT using those as they can damage the special coatings on our expensive touch screens.
While C|Net didn't mention it, one possible cleaning solution that should work well is eyeglass cleaner. Unlike harsh chemicals like household and window cleaners, it's designed to work on coated glass that gets placed on our faces and does a nice job of cleaning up any smears on the screen. Which actually makes your touch screen much more accurate and you'll do better playing Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, Call of Duty, or whatever your favorite time killer game is.
Game playing and fast fingered texting aside, if a little bit of gentle washing on our phones keeps us from getting the flu or Coronavirus, we're all for it.