The magnets housed in the accessories of our mobiles can be very useful. For example, phone cases with a magnet on the back allow you to attach your phone to mount it in a car. This can be useful if you need to answer a call from someone, but don’t want to take your eyes off the road and don’t want to use a clip-on mount.
Due to the increase in this type of covers and cases in many stores, quite a few users have asked us the question: Can magnets be harmful to the phone? We all know that they can damage credit or transportation cards and that they don’t get along with other electronic products, but are they just as bad for smartphones?
The risks of magnetic cases
If you ask us to get wet, we are among those who do not recommend using this type of accessory because they can cause the smartphone to malfunction, both momentarily and for long periods of time. It is not that the current equipment is going to break as it happened with those old televisions that lost color if a magnet was moved in front of it, but we are going to prevent the phone from working as it should.
The magnetic covers that we can use with our phones are usually made of materials such as nickel, iron and cobalt. These compounds can inadvertently rub against the phone and generate magnetic fields, affecting functions that react to these magnets.
Moreover, we do not say so, but it is the brands themselves, such as Apple, who warn that, when using these accessories, the phone may work less than optimally .
Internal magnets in some iPhone accessories create magnetic fields that can affect the phone’s rear cameras. To reduce image movement and the corresponding loss of sharpness, the lenses move according to the angle of the gyroscope. What happens is that these lens position sensors respond to magnetic fields and if you place a magnet near these sensors, the magnetic field will interfere with them or disable them temporarily.
But we are no longer just talking about how it can affect the capture of photographs. Other mobile sensors, such as the compass, can be affected by this type of magnetism and cause smartphone location problems . If you are a regular in navigation apps or similar, we do not recommend choosing this type of add-on.
In addition, we cannot forget the issue of coverage. We will always have more signal on our smartphone if we stay away from magnets and other magnetic elements as much as possible.
And yes, of course we are also going to recommend that you avoid cases like the ones in the image, that is, all those horrifying cases in the shape of a human appendix, stuffed rabbit or anything else that makes the efforts in designing mobiles every ever more elegant fall on deaf ears.
