Skip to main content

A mean, clean screen - Toddy Gear review

If I am honest, I am something of a stranger to having a clean screen on my phone and iPad. As you can see from the image on the right, my iPad screen, left to its own devices, has strangely straight skid-like marks, as well as lots of other fingerprinty gunge.

When I have made attempts to clean the screen in the past, it has usually been a quick wipe on the shirt for the iPhone, or an attempt with a damp tissue on the iPad, neither of which is particularly effective. Those long streaks, for instance, prove pretty well impossible to shift.

So I was delighted when I was offered the chance to try out some screen cleaning products that go under the odd name of Toddy Gear (no relation to Top Gear or Argentina).

In essence, what we're dealing with are specialist cleaning cloths. They are apparently anti-microbial, but most obviously they have two sides, a plush grey side for cleaning and a shiny, silky side for a final polish (rarely needed in my testing) - and they work like magic. I gave the screen you can see in the picture about three reasonably firm wipes with the grey side and it looked as new. I was particularly happy at being able to do this without fluids involved, as I'm always a little nervous mixing liquids and my precious electronic equipment (without which, frankly, I couldn't survive on the move).

The Toddy Gear range seems to have three other features. First it's colourful. You can choose your cloth from a whole range of patterns - I can't say this excites me excessively, but it will work for some people. Secondly there are a number of designs. I got sent three, shown here - the straightforward cloth on the right, the pocket version that cunningly folds into itself to form a little pouch on the left, and the pyramid version in the middle.

That pyramid shape, apart from cunningly doubling as a stand for your phone as demonstrated, is particularly effective to hold for a firm grip, though of course, it has much less area than the conventional cloth, especially as only one of its sides is plush. And the final feature? They are pretty expensive as cloths go - but arguably for the effectiveness, they are worth every penny.

Is Toddy Gear going to transform your life? Almost certainly not.  Does the effect last for ever? No, as soon as you use your phone or tablet it will need another wipe. But if you find that the permanent fingerprint-covered look is something that you'd rather not have on your hi-tech kit (I also found it worked well on shiny computer screens, like my iMac, or even on spectacles), then this is a good buy.

The whole range (including decidedly more tasteful cloths than mine, which I think is best suited to a golf player) is available direct from the US-based Toddy Gear website. In the UK, a limited number of the cloths are available from Amazon (see slide show below for some choice examples).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope