Your phone may or may not be dirtier than a toilet seat right now, but luckily you can fix that with the best phone sanitizer. After all, our phones pick up a whole heap of bacteria, germs, and other nastiness when we set them down throughout our days. Cleaning our phones is paramount, and while ultraviolet phone sanitizers can cost a pretty penny, they're 110% worth the investment if they can keep you from getting sick, now more than ever.
Best by a landslide
PhoneSoap 3
Staff pick
PhoneSoap is one of the originals and is still one of the most trusted ultraviolet phone sanitizers around. Reliability and excellent build quality are part of why we love PhoneSoap's products.
Flip and repeat
HoMedics UV-Clean Phone Sanitizer
This sanitizer keeps a slim, travel-friendly profile by being collapsible, and the lid zips open and closed to help ensure that UV light doesn't leak out and damage your eyes or your skin. You will have to run your phone through once on each side, though.
No ozone smell
Lecone UV Cell Phone Sanitizer
At first, I was confused about why you'd want an aromatherapy function on an ultraviolet phone sanitizer, but I'll be the first to admit the smell of ozone that emanates from more funky sanitized items can be offputting. If it makes you nauseous, this cleaner can replace the ozone smell with essential oils.
Bigger and more adaptable
HoMedics UV-Clean Portable Sanitizer Bag
The only downfall of HoMedics's smaller UV-Clean rig is that it only sanitizes one side of your device at a time. This one, however, props up your phone — or face mask or keys — so that it can clean both sides at once.
Charge as you clean
Samsung Electronics Samsung Qi Wireless Charger and UV Sanitizer
Samsung's UV Sanitizer is big enough that you can even use it to clean your Galaxy Buds and other thicker devices. There's a wireless charger built in so that you can top off while you clean, and the sanitizer is powered by a USB-C port.
For the largest phones
PhoneSoap Pro
If you tend to get phones with the largest screen you can afford, some phone sanitizers might not fit your oversized smartphone. PhoneSoap sells a larger Pro version to accommodate Note and other phablet-sized phones.
What matters in an ultraviolet phone sanitizer?
There are a wide variety of ultraviolet phone cleaners out there: tent/box models, tanning salon-like clamshells, and wands. We're staying away from wands for three reasons:
- Too easy to hurt yourself: UV-C can seriously damage your eyes in seconds and can also damage your skin, so enclosed sanitizers are safer for a home environment where kids might try to mess with something that looks like a "magic wand".
- Easier to mess up: Wands rely on you to hold the wand over your phone at the right angle for the right amount of time, and humans are prone to skipping steps and speeding up their counts.
- Expensive: UV-C wands that are actually effective are more expensive to come by right now — and the good ones are sold out.
Skip the wands and go enclosed! The best ultraviolet phone sanitizer is the PhoneSoap 3. If you need something more travel-friendly, I recommend grabbing the HoMedics UV-Clean Phone Sanitizer, which works quicker than the PhoneSoap and is more readily available. Unfortunately, you'll need to flip your phone to clean each side of it. Actually, it takes more than just flipping it once to get your phone completely clean.
Also keep in mind that a phone sanitizer only deals with killing germs in the grime on your phone, it won't magically get rid of all the dirt and the physical buildup on your phone. For that, you'll want to grab a trusty cleaning kit to wipe all the filth off and get it out of the the pinhole mics and ports.
How to properly clean your phone with UV-C
These all might be ultraviolet phone sanitizers, but unless your sanitizer has a highly reflective interior like the PhoneSoap, you need to do more than stick your phone inside and walk away. Here's how to ensure you completely and utterly eliminate the germs on your phone:
- If your phone is wearing a case, take the case off.
- Run the case through the ultraviolet phone sanitizer once face up.
- Take the case out and run the ultraviolet phone sanitizer empty to eliminate any germs that are transferred from the back of your case to the bottom of the sanitizer bay.
- Run the case through the ultraviolet phone sanitizer again face down.
- Take the case out and run the ultraviolet phone sanitizer empty to eliminate any germs that are transferred from the front of your case to the bottom of the sanitizer bay.
- Run your phone through the ultraviolet phone sanitizer once face up.
- Take the phone out and run the ultraviolet phone sanitizer empty to eliminate any germs that are transferred from the back of your phone to the bottom of the sanitizer bay.
- Run the case through the ultraviolet phone sanitizer again face down.
- Take the case out and run the ultraviolet phone sanitizer empty to eliminate any remaining germs so they don't incubate in your dark, empty sanitizer until your next cleaning cycle.
- Put your case back on your phone.
Source: androidcentral