WARNING: Long, detailed post about my experience installing my AO glass screen protector. Skip to the bottom if you just want my advice....
I finally got around to installing my AO HD Clear glass a few days ago. Whoa, what an effort! I'm very particular about installing my screen protectors, because I know that airborne particles are the enemy and I can see ONE dust spec when I'm done. I apply all my phone protectors (for my family of 5) in a steamy bathroom so that the dust particles are weighed down and less likely to impinge on my effort. Since I can't fit my Tesla in the bathroom, I knew I was in for some effort. Oh, and the screen protector is 15 inches! God help me. Anyway for days prior to the install, I left my car's AC in manual and OFF, and cleaned the screen to 99.9% level in anticipation of one morning actually having time. After a few days, the opportunity finally arrived. I brought with me the contents of the package, mostly unwrapped because I didn't want to open all the stuff in the car and kick up dust. I also brought a bright light, my wipe and glass cleaner, and extra scotch tape. I got in the car and quickly shut the door and evaluated things. Screen still looked 99% clean, so I setup some lighting and began. Alcohol wipe first. Then used the little wipe and the combo of the alcohol wipe and cleaning cloth left things horribly smudgy! Much worse than before I started. Ugh. I re-cleaned with my products (lint free cloth and invisible glass cleaner) and was able to get things pretty damn good. I kept seeing the occasional dust particle land and tried the included dust tape. They grabbed the dust, but occasionally left visible residue! Damn this kit is 0/2 so far! Re-clean the screen with my wipe to remove residue and decided to give up on dust tape and just keep hitting it with my cloth. Got it as close to perfect as a 15" will ever get and moved to practice fit the screen. I used their yellow tape and got it positioned exactly where I wanted it. I added 2 more pieces of scotch tape because I didn't trust their tape. When I lifted the screen to begin peeling the protective sheet, I noticed my clean screen was FILTHY again. Apparently the plastic protective film is in no way kept clean in the packaging/mfg process and left tons of crap all over my screen. SIGH. So, I re-cleaned the screen while holding the taped protector in the air. After several wipes and re-wipes (not using dust stickers!), got it good. So, again, I started to pull off the protective cover, only this time as I loaded the screen/tape pulling on the protective cover, the special tape that AO provided gave way and the screen started to slip and lose its position. Ok. Deep breath. I can survive this. Luckily I had read a few reports that made me suspect the AO tape and sure enough it is junk. I added some more scotch tape (about 3 more pieces) and re-verified the position since when the tape slipped, so did my positioning. Now that the position was good again and I had reliable tape, I just had to re-clean the LCD again because the dirty film had touched it while I positioned it. Lift the screen, re-clean for the millionth time, pull the film and slowly lower, top first.....
It went swimmingly from here. The screen slowly grabbed onto the LCD and after pushing a few big air bubbles, which was easy, I had a perfect screen protector application. If there is dust, I don't see it and that's just as good as perfect for me. In summary, if you are the type of person who agonizes over dust when applying screen protectors, this isn't an easy job. Knowing the details of my experience is valuable. In hindsight I would do the following:
- Don't use AO tape or dust stickers at all
- Prepare the night ahead and turn AC to manual and OFF and clean the screen to 99%
- Open the packaging outside your car and wipe down the film that covers the LCD side ahead of time outside the vehicle
- Get in car with screen protector, cleaning products, tape and flashlight and close the door.
- Don't bother re-cleaning screen yet. Get position and tape over top with 4-5 pieces of scotch tape. I always slightly fold over both ends to make removal easy, so make them long enough to fold the ends and still be useful
- Once screen looks positioned perfect, lift up to horizontal and re-clean the screen to perfection
- Pull the film paying attention that the top tape stays engaged
- Drop slowly allowing the tape to maintain your alignment/position
- Push out bubbles
- Enjoy
It's sad that AO spend so much time spec'ing/choosing the yellow tape and it's still total garbage. As are the alcohol wipe and dust stickers. I should tell them. The glass screen protector, on the other hand, is a great fit and I'm enjoying knowing I won't scratch my panel with the drag type inputs!
