Chipped, cracked and scratched. Is this tempered screen protector any good?
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Today we’re going to review the Tech Armor Ballistic Glass. This is an average tempered glass screen protector that will protect your iPhone’s touch screen.
The rounded edges of the screen protector are nice and it’s not terribly thick but we had a few issues in terms of durability when compared to other tempered glass screen protectors. One of the best features is the price as it’s about 10 dollars for this screen protector which is 1/2 of what most other screen protectors will cost.
Based on our time the case, we gave it a score of 3.5 ehs’ out of 5. This isn’t the best screen protector that we’ve used as it doesn’t far as well as Sir Lancelot’s Holy Grail but does better than the Spigen Glas.TR. If you’d rather read the rest of this review, head over to our website and if you want to see how this screen protector holds up against other screen protectors, head over to our comparison tool.
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Design – Yep, its glass.
In terms of design, the installation of the screen protector was fairly straight forward and Tech Armor does include several things to make the install easier. Re-application of the screen protector isn’t great as we found a bit of warping along the side of the screen protector and if you do reapply it, give it a couple of days for the air bubbles to go away completely.
For the fit, the screen protector covers most of the iPhone’s touchscreen which again, seems silly to us. The build quality of the screen protector is what really bothers us. We took a drill to the screen protector which left a few scratches that over a span of a week turned into cracks but since this is glass, its not unexpected.
This chip along the edge occurred during one of my Periscope.tv’s sessions where my iPhone topped forward and landed on some small debris. We do understand that it is glass but the Tech Armor Ballistic Glass seemed to show wear and tear a little more than other glass screen protectors.
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Protection – We’re not sure how tough it is…
In terms of protection, knife and keys did nothing to the screen protector whereas sandpaper definitely left its mark. Now, Tech Armor claims there is 9H hardness to their product which may be true but the layer that actually has 9H hardness covered by 2 additional layers.
In our testing, we thought the scratches might have been from those two layers but the subsequent cracks from the scratches leads us to believe that the glass isn’t 9H. Given the amount of damage to the screen protector, we didn’t do our drop test with Bertha so we’re assuming that its going to react like any other glass screen protector. Despite all this, there is a lifetime warranty on the product and honestly, for 10 bucks, you can 2-3 of these for every Spigen or Sir Lancelot screen protector.
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Functionality – Its glass. Its good.
In terms of screen viewability and sensitivity, the Tech Armor Ballistic Glass screen protector acts like all the other glass screen protectors, even with the slightly bubbling after the re-install. we’ll be honest with you, after staring at a dozen screen protectors, there’s almost no big differences between them.
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Brett
May 8, 2015 at 1:03 pm
What kind of case do you have on the iPhone in the tech armor video? The orange and black case..
Thanks,
Brett