Mobile Cloth promotes itself as “A revolution against fingerprints”. I never knew my fingerprints were part of the ruling class to begin with.
Mobile Cloth really does describe what it does. It’s a microfiber cloth for cleaning mobiles, or indeed anything with a screen that might attract fingerprints. If you have kids, as I do, that’s pretty much anything with a screen, period.
On the fingerprint cleaning side of the equation, there’s really only one way to assess the Mobile Cloth, and that’s to use it to clean something. So ate some food, got myself good and slovenly, and then played some games on an iPad Mini 3.
This was what it looked like when I was done, with the screen off to maximise the “eww” potential of all those fingerprints.
This was what it looked like after ten very quick revolutions of the larger Mobile Cloth. Not quite spotless, but considerably better, and undeniably better than using a t-shirt or similar to remove all that finger grease.
Having done that, I then proceeded to clean just about every screen I could find with the mobile cloth. When it’s just tackling fingerprints, it does quite a good job, although if you do have any slightly more persistent material (best not to think about it), you may require more heavy rubbing or perhaps just some water to hasten the cleaning process. The Mobile Cloth can be cleaned and re-used, although they warn against using heavy detergents when doing so.
In the straight smudge cleaning respect, I don’t have too much of an issue with the Mobile Cloth. It does what it says on the box with regards to removing fingerprints, and that’s what it’s best at.
It appears moderately priced — local distributor PADACS (who sent me the review samples I’ve used) charges $10.99 for one 9×9″ “Classic” cloth and one smaller 4×4″ “Nano” cloth, while $17.95 scores you five of the larger “Classic” designs with multi-coloured edges.
Update: The original version of this article originally compared the Australian Mobile Cloth pricing with US pricing, but incorrectly compared a single cloth price with the dual cloth pack available in Australia. Fat Duck Tech regrets this error.
There’s one claim on the Mobile Cloth packaging, and again on the associated website that I do have some issue with, and it’s the matter of this claim that it removes “up to 98 per cent of germs and viruses”. That’s a big claim, and it’s one that I’m sure that will sell more than a few Mobile Cloths to those who worry incessantly about such things.
That clip isn’t just there because I’m a big Weird Al fan, however. Bacteria are a serious part of why we’re all alive, and a lot of the hype around “anti-bacterial” solutions plays on some very simple fears and misunderstandings about how science works. Yes, your phone, tablet and touchscreen PC collects a few fingerprints. So does everything else you interact with, and short of wrapping yourself in pre-boiled clingfilm, there’s little you can or should do about it.
Just as a friendly safety warning: Don’t wrap yourself in pre-boiled clingfilm. That would be a bad move.
But even moving beyond that, the science around using microfiber cloths like the Mobile Cloth has to be carefully considered.
This study from 2012 — four years after the study that Mobile Cloth itself cites — concludes that indeed microfiber cloths can remove significant proportions of viruses compared to terry cloth style cotton, but that there was significant possibility of spreading those viruses to other surfaces. The same conclusions were reached with regards to bacteria and microfiber cloths in this study. Science is an evolving matter of study, but pretty much any research I could find also suggested that the efficiency of such cloths degraded as they were cleaned, which you’d expect.
Or in other words, the anti-germ possibilities of the Mobile Cloth are best used if you’re only going to use them once and immediately disintegrate them rather than, say, clean your phone and then put the cloth back into a bag, pocket or onto a desk. Which is what the majority of Mobile Cloth users are in fact going to do.
A microbiologist friend of mine also pointed out to me that if they’re cleaning fingerprint-borne viruses and bacteria, then those viruses and bacteria will have predominantly come from your fingerprints, so they’re items you’ve already got present on you in any case.
So what’s the final verdict? As a “revolution against fingerprints”, the Mobile Cloth scores very well indeed. It’s a very effective way to make any kind of screen appear shiny and new with ease. As a way to keep yourself and your family safe from germs, I’m less convinced, but then I’m also significantly less paranoid than a lot of anti-bacterial advertising would suggest I should be.
As a convenience tool, the Mobile Cloth is good at cleaning screens, but probably not the bacterial bubble it claims to be.
Also, I totally just reviewed a cloth. I never thought I’d do that.