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If you own the new iPhone 12 or iPhone 12 Pro, congratulations! They’re really cool smartphones, and that revamped design is pretty cool. I’m in favor of a better grip on the flat edges, and they feel good in the hand.
That better grip should be able to reduce the chances of phones slipping out of hand, especially for those of us predisposed to clumsiness. And you certainly don’t want to drop them, because the screens on new phones seem to be (in my own experience, anyway) quite susceptible to scratches.
Some context, first. In the process of unpacking the review units to take some first impression photos, you may have left a few micro scratches on the iPhone 12 Pro screen. Which is a bit painful to bear, considering you hadn’t even turned the device on. at that moment.
Anyway, this was what must have caused the scratches. I let the two phones sit on top of each other, the iPhone 12 on top of the iPhone 12 Pro, to take this photo below. To show off those flat rails and everything.
But while adjusting the two phones so they were lined up on top of each other, I must have inadvertently scratched the iPhone 12 Pro screen with the iPhone 12’s rear camera bump. My bad, I must admit.
But again, I didn’t expect the screen to be so easily disfigured. After all, one of Apple’s great focal points for their new phones is that they are covered in a new type of glass that they call “Ceramic Shield.” The marketing materials noted that it is the strongest glass ever in a smartphone thanks to a combination of glass and ceramic crystals that is four times more resistant to damage from drops.
While I haven’t dropped the iPhone 12 Pro (yet), it appears to have already suffered some surface damage that cannot be removed with the usual remedy of polishing them with toothpaste. Sure, the scratch lines on my unit are a bit small and not very noticeable when in use, but what a shame to have spoiled the excellent OLED display right out of its box.
Normally, you never check demo units for durability with scratches because 100s of people touch them every day.
But I've never seen them get scratched. Obviously, these come from the grips on the screen, but those look like plastic. That *shouldn't* be scratching the screen.
— Max Weinbach (@MaxWinebach) October 26, 2020
However, I am not the only one surprised. Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee also pointed out that his own iPhone 12 already has some screen outages and he has no idea how it happened. However, he made an interesting point: scratch resistance is inversely proportional to shatter protection. The softer something is, the more resistant they are to breaking, but the downside is that they are easier to scratch.
That’s not to say Ceramic Shield isn’t tough, it managed to withstand real-world shatter and scratch tests. Tech channel MobileReviewsEH recently put the iPhone 12 up to the durability challenge, and its display was apparently much more scratch resistant than what Brownlee or I faced.
Things like coins, pebbles, keys, and even a cashier’s knife failed to scratch the iPhone 12 screen, so keeping the phone in your pocket should be reasonably well. However, dropping a naked iPhone 12 from a height of three meters will break that screen.
But in any case, the little marks on my freshly unboxed iPhone 12 Pro should serve as a warning to owners of the new iPhones (or any other smartphone, for that matter). Screensavers are your friends.
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