Smartphones do a lot of wonderful things, but they fail miserably at resisting scratches. We'd like to say metallic bodies don't scratch as easily, but that would be a barefaced lie. The last thing you want is a brand new smartphone that gets scratched in a matter of days.
- Watch us performing these stress tests here.
Here at TechRadar India, we decided to test smartphones on this front. We took one of the most popular smartphones today, the Xiaomi Mi A1, and put it through some simple, real-world scratch tests. The objective here is to see if the Mi A1 is dependable on day-to-day usage, and we daresay the phone came out with flying colours.
The objective here is to try day-to-day scenarios, so you won't see us taking a knife to the device. Most smartphones don't promise completely scratch-proof displays, and you will almost never scratch your phone with a knife. We will keep those extreme tests for phones that specifically boasts certain features.
So, for the Mi A1, we tried keys, spare change and sand. Interestingly, the phone survived the key and spare change challenges without breaking a sweat.
We then rubbed the device on a layer of sand, a very effective scratching tool. As experts would agree, the sand in your pocket is often the reason for those micro scratches on the display.
It's no surprise that the Mi A1 picked up a few scratches here, but we're actually quite happy with the results. All we would really see is one big scratch on the display. Ideally, that makes the phone quite resistant to scratching and you should be able to get away with micro scratches on day-to-day terms. If you don't like screen protectors, this might be the phone for you.
- Read the Xiaomi Mi A1 review.
