David Pogue’s Magic Pockets

In telling the interesting story of Gorilla Glass, the New York Times’ idea of a technology writer says he can’t understand why people encase their elegant phones in ugly protective sleeves and boxes. After all, they can be carried safely, naked in a pocket, all day long with neither scratch nor ding. As proof of the superfluousness of screen protectors, Pogue trots out the tired carnival trick that shows that the screens don’t seem to be scratched by keys, the objects that most people seem to think are the sharpest and most phone-menacing in their pockets.

Here, as elsewhere, the reader is best advised to consider technology journalism in the Times to be, at best, light entertainment, and not to regard it as a source of advice. Pogue rarely bothers to do more than superficial research before typing his articles, even if by a trivial effort he could avoid misleading his fans. In a nutshell: if you’re planning to carry your phone in your pocket or purse, put it in some kind of a case, unless you don’t mind reading through a marred screen, or can afford to buy a new one (or can count on being supplied by manufacturers’ samples) whenever it gets scratched up.

In fact, keys are made from brass, which is a soft metal that does not even scratch common glass; the harder Gorilla glass used for the front surface of some phones is certainly safe from brass and even some harder metals. Brass is even used in windshield ice-scrapers, because it will not scratch your car windows.

The scratches will come from tiny pieces of hard grid, such as sand grains, that inevitably find their way into our pockets. To prevent scratches from sand would require a much more expensive slab of a hard mineral, such as is used for the crystal (in which case it is actually a crystal) in expensive watches. In addition, much softer stuff will scratch the plastic parts of your devices, as you’ve already found out if you’ve followed David Pogue’s advice.