These days our smartphones go wherever we go, they tell us how to get there, they help us get a ride home when we’ve had one too many, and they basically help us stay tethered to the outside world no matter where we are. As such, we end up using our smartphones in some, shall we say, interesting situations. It’s well-documented that a lot of people use their smartphones while on the toilet, when cooking in the kitchen and well, pretty much everywhere else we find ourselves throughout the day. While modern humans often wash their hands frequently and have a good grasp on hygiene, our smartphones are the devices that end up picking all of this dirt and bacteria up from our travels. If you think shiny devices like the Galaxy S7 Edge pictured above are fingerprint magnets, you’ll need to think again, as they’re also magnets for all types of nasty bacteria, and you should be cleaning that phone of yours.
Philip Tierno, a Microbiologist and Pathologist at the New York University School of Medicine suggests that “it is wise to periodically clean your phone”. Tierno goes on to say that he cleans his phone at the end of every day with a simple wipe and that while it’s okay to miss a day or two of cleaning, it’s unwise to never clean your device. This makes a lot of sense, even if it does sound a little bit over-the-top. All the bacteria that you innocently pick up throughout the day from opening doors, shaking hands, eating food and so on all end up on your smartphone. It sounds pretty much as though this is the modern day equivalent of dirty keyboards. During the late 90’s and early 2000’s it was common for stories of filthy keyboards harboring all sorts of germs and bacteria to hit the news, and just as we’ve learned to clean our keyboards, we’ve probably learnt to clean our smartphones.
Keeping a device clean is also just common sense, after all the better a device looks at the end of a contract or when you want to move up the ladder, the more it’ll be worth. Cleaning your device with a simple microfiber cloth will get the job done for the most part, but regularly cleaning with something a little more thorough probably won’t hurt, and if you covet your smartphone like many of us do, you’ll want to keep it looking its best.