Waterproof phones have been available for a few years, but Kyocera is taking things a step further. The company’s new Digno Rafre smartphone is soap-proof as well.
That means you can literally wash the phone with soap and water if it gets dirty.
Sure, you can usually remove dust and oil smudges from a phone with a cloth. But what about germs? That’s where soap can come in handy.
Not convinced your phone is out to make you sick? I suppose there might be another reason a soap-proof phone is useful: you can use it in the kitchen, the bath tub, or other environments without worrying that a splash of soap and water will turn your phone into a useless lump of dead electronics.
Kyocera says you can even use the touchscreen when the phone is wet.
The Kyocera Digno Rafre features a 5 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, a 3,000 mAh battery, and a $465 price tag. Japanese wireless carrier KDDI will begin offering the phone December 4th.
I… I’ve been sorta doing that to my Nexus 4 for a few years now… Eh… Hmm…
This is such a brilliant idea to mix the common sense organic soap with the not so obvious inorganic electronics that accumulate germs because of aquaphobia sensitive electronics. This actually embraces a lesser known reality of handled technology: if we need to be clean, it needs to be clean.
Too bad about the entrance level specs. I guess they aren’t that confident about this new technology to put it in a flagship device. I mean the price _is_ for a flagship phone, but when will we forget the S410?
They don’t have to do that. There’s plenty of money to be made at the lower end, and my experience in sales was that the Hydro Elite went over like gangbusters among the people who just wanted a smartphone with relatively basic functions. All they’re really going to do is call, text, email and maybe navigation, that did it all (until they shot their feet off entirely with fatal software errors). That’s the kind of market that would love to hear that they could wash their new phone safely, and maybe then it’ll become standard among flagship phones too.