iPhone 3GS oleophobic coating on other phones?

[cyberface]

One of the ergonomically most advanced features of the iPhone 3GS is the oleophobic surface coating on the device and particularly on the screen. As the name implies, it doesn't like oils and hence the touchscreen doesn't get visibly greasy and filthy after heavy use, like the 3G and all other devices.

Does anyone know if this is an Apple patent or are there clear film screen protectors with this technology? Could I buy a screen protector for a 3GS and trim it to size on my Nx1? The only annoyance on the Nx1 is the greasy screen, and I'm almost OCD when it comes to smartphone cleanliness...

[Man-At-Arms]

surface coating is not new
we've been buying fabric felt with oleophobic & hydrophobic treatments for the past 15yrs

[HereBeMonsters]

I found my new 3GS getting worse grease and finger marks on it than my old 3G actually, so bought something called "Anti-Glare Film". Gives it a great texture under the finger and is really hard to mark.

[CommanderJameson]

Has anyone ever tried dribbling actual oil onto a 3GS and uploading the resultant video to YouTube?

just wondering how oleophobic it actually is. I know my BB Storm 2 is more -philic than -phobic...

[FourWheelDrift]

I've just taken a protective screen off my 3GS because it kept getting smeared, it's immediately noticably better without.

[LordGrover]

HereBeMonsters said:

I found my new 3GS getting worse grease and finger marks on it than my old 3G actually, so bought something called "Anti-Glare Film". Gives it a great texture under the finger and is really hard to mark.

Same here. It feels great, better than the naked device, is anti-glare and affords good protection. Definite thumbup from me.
They're to fit the iPhone so if the Nexus or whatever is smaller you should be able to trim-to-fit.

[cyberface]

Man-At-Arms said:

surface coating is not new
we've been buying fabric felt with oleophobic & hydrophobic treatments for the past 15yrs

Indeed, and nowhere in my OP did I suggest that I wasn't aware of the fact that surfactants in their many forms have been used in industry since before I was born.

However - the *projective* capacitive touchscreen on the iPhone (and the Nx1, and the Palm Pre, and all other phones with similar capacitive screens) require certain electrostatic properties to work. I'm not an expert in the technology behind the field (I'm not an EE) but I'm a very experienced user - as a compulsive early-adopter I've tried virtually all of the touchscreen devices out there I also have a nasty habit of biting my nails - extreme stress both and work and self-induced 'leisure stress' (yeah, I'm fked up) and the fact that I find typing very fast on the typical keyboards I use hard with long nails, plus I *try* to play the guitar (if you'd heard me, you'd question the word 'play') which isn't great with long nails on my left hand (OK, justification over, let the Freudian freaks explain why nailbiting has something to do with the shape of my father's penis) means that my constantly short nails (and larger effective hemispherical finger area) work rather well with the current breed of projective capacitive touchscreens, and Apple's large trackpads on their laptops.

Why is this relevant? Well, I've had every iPhone since the very beginning. And it only works with *fingers*. I haven't been able to get it to work with a stylus of any material (presumably an 'active' stylus similar in concept to those used with Wacom's graphics tablets would work) - including fingernails. I don't have sufficient fingernail length to test this so the Scientific Method was employed...

Human subjects were a control group of three - my mate from Japan who weirdly grows and manicures his fingernails to 1.5+ cm length, my girlfriend who has sensible 0.5-1.0 cm length fingernails (limited by her complaints that they break beyond that, and my aesthetic concerns that long fingernails look silly and mean you are seriously restricted in the work you can do), the toenails of my large toes (grown to 4 mm especially for the occasion), and two fingerpads from each hand of each person, and two toepads from each food of each person. On top of the human factors, a range of materials were selected as 'styluses' - from wood of different tip thickness and sharpness, rubber erasers of different sizes, thermoplastics (polyethylene wrapped around electrically inert base material, and bubble wrap on its own), resin-based thermosetting plastics (bits of broken computer), a variety of metal elements (I could only use pure magnesium, pure tungsten and pure indium), a variety of metal alloys (random tools, so types of steel and aluminium alloys), and then for fun, a couple of AA batteries (one old, discharged 2100 mAh NiMH chemistry cell, and one fresh, standard Duracell unit).

To counter the possible methodological flaw of using one iPhone, which may have been working suboptimally or anomalously, the control was to perform the tests on four iPhone units - one original mk1 device, two early iPhone 3G units, and one of my iPhone 3GS models. However, I can report that all four devices worked identically, and there was no variation across device type, so further discussion will only refer to 'iPhone'.

The standard 'test' was to bring the iPhone to life by pressing the Home button (using any implement - pressing the Home button was irrelevant to the touchscreen so in general I pressed the button with my finger), and then to attempt to 'unlock' the iPhone by swiping the 'slide to unlock' UI element from left to right. This doesn't require high resolution, is a nice 11x7 mm size virtual 'button' to hit, and involves 'moving' the 'button' 32 mm in order to 'unlock' the device. Apologies for detailed description but there are some rather extreme Apple haters here who presumably have never used an iPhone due to the irreparable damage such an act would do to their public image and carefully crafted individuality

The experiment yielded the following results:

1. No electrically resistive 'styluses' would get any reaction from the iPhone touchscreen. Wood, rubber, plastic, cardboard, even stuff that appeared to be aluminium but may have been aluminium painted (or sprayed) plastic.

2. Metal 'styli' required a very large amount of surface area to contact the touchscreen in order for any response to occur. Pointed tip type styli, as you'd expect to use if the point of a stylus was to achieve greater resolution than that achievable by human fingers, had no effect at all. We were obviously limited in the pressure we'd use on the cheaper-made 3G and 3GS models, but on the sapphire watch-crystal screen of the mk1 iPhone (still the best build quality of all of them), firm pressure from an awl out of my watchmaker's toolbox (tip approximately 0.5 mm in diameter) had no effect. However fashioning a flat-bottomed, large surface-area metallic tool would activate the iPhone.

3. If the metal 'stylus' was held by a subject and swiped across the screen, much less surface area was required. Holding the iPhone in one insulated (gloved) hand, and holding the metal block (the pure elements were cylinders between 30 and 35 mm in diameter and 55 mm tall) with a bare hand made the activation MUCH easier than when holding the metal blocks in gloved hands. However, with gloved hands, and the magnesium block (the least conductive, due to the oxide layer on the outside), it was still possible to activate the phone (yeah it sounds insane but I collect pure elements, it's fun - I'm desperately after a decent sized chunk of iridium and also, hopefully, depleted uranium (U238, don't want any of that more fissile stuff)). Large surface areas of metal were needed to activate the iPhone swipe. Pretty much the entire magnesium cylinder on its side was required.

4. Interestingly, given the 'capacitive' activity of the screen, I expected the AA batteries to either cause confusion or potentially make the devices go haywire. However, both behaved in exactly the same way as inert metal objects. Using the positive terminal of each battery (a circle 4 mm in diameter) was a lot less successful (it worked, but less reliably) than using the negative terminal (0.9 mm diameter on the Duracell, 1.0 mm on the NiMH rechargeable). Using the negative terminal was as successful as a human finger. Even more interestingly, the fact that the Duracell was fresh and fully charged (1.617 V on the multimeter) gave no difference in performance over the exhausted 2100 mAh NiMH cell (rated at 1.2 V, but actually a whopping 0.000 V on my multimeter. I will put the cell on charge ).

5. Importantly, fingernails and toenails did NOT work unless the fingerpad or toepad was sufficiently close to the screen to alter the capacitance significantly. This appeared to be proportional to dampness of the skin of the individual concerned. Toenails were hard to rule out, since nobody in the group had excessively long toenails and this meant that the toepads were significantly closer to the touchscreen, activating it. Also one subject had particularly sweaty feet and would activate the touchscreen with toenail only in the downward position. However held *above* the toe, with the toenail shielding the toe underneath, and the top of the toenail touching the touchscreen, had no effect - even on the subject with sweaty feet. My fingernails are very short and as a result I was the only individual who could activate the iPhone touchscreen with fingernail alone - since the fingernail was in contact with fingerpad, the only experimental technique possible was to invert my finger, and run the top of my nail across the screen. The thickness (top to bottom) of my fingernails is less than a millimetre and immediately behind this is the nailbed, which being 'flesh' will behave no differently to someone with thickly callused fingers. However both my girlfriend and my mate with the long nails, when using the fingernails as a 'stylus' and pressing perpendicularly on the iPhone screens, had either no effect or extremely random effect.


Why is this remotely relevant? Most of you won't have read this far anyway The bottom line appears to be that styli (excepting 'active' styli of which I have no experience) make no odds on the particular type of capacitive touchscreen used by Apple in the iPhone, and by the vast majority of competitors who are now demanding the coolness that is 'multitouch' on their new smartphones, whether they are running Android, Linux, Symbian, Windows, or whatever. They all are geared up to work with human fingers, which have water in them and a level of electrical conductivity and capacitance.

Presumably this limits the surfactant chemistry that you can reliably use on such devices. When buying 'screen protectors' for my first iPhone 3GS (the mk1 didn't need one - the screen was as hard as the sapphire crystal used on decent wristwatches, and as such I felt completely safe leaving it in my jeans pocket with car keys), the screen protector manufacturers made a big fuss about the multi-layer polymer technology required in the screen protector to ensure the capacitive touchscreen *still worked*.

So - the question still remains. Does this particular type of capacitive touchscreen limit the surfactants one can use - especially oleophobic ones? The touchscreen hardware design and the surfactant chemistries are surely all now out of patent, but I wouldn't put it past Apple to try to patent a particular combination of surfactants specifically tailored to ensure that the finger-operated touchscreen still works to the optimum. After all, finger grease and smudgy fingerprints are the main inhibitors of iPhone touchscreen performance, and I noticed a huge leap in continued performance with the 3GS (not response time, this being due to the hardware upgrade, but in terms of continued high resolution multi-touch performance).

Are the 'screen protector' people selling protectors specifically compatible with the 3GS? You'd be annoyed if you paid over the odds for a 3GS for the fingerprint-proof new coating, only to waste it by putting a screen protector on that has the same behaviour as your old 3G, surely? And if there are 'screen protectors' out there using the exact same oleophobic coating that Apple use on the 3GS, then I want one NOW because I can put one on my Nexus One and make the screen as easy to keep clean as my old iPhone 3GS.

Apologies for long post but it was an interesting experiment

[redtwin]

Interesting, but you didn't try a Korean sausage, did you?.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv02XeCMQFs

[cyberface]

redtwin said:

Interesting, but you didn't try a Korean sausage, did you?.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv02XeCMQFs

You know?

You know?

You know?


Actually, no I didn't. Perhaps the mythical PH Computer forum EE who can explain the results of my *proper* experiment could also comment on some jackass waving sausages around?



fk this, I'm off for a drive. This is Pistonheads, after all....

[cs02rm0]

Someone's been hitting the sugar hard today!