The technological progress of recent years in the telephony sector has meant a revolution for the user. Nowadays, smartphones do not offer only and exclusively hardware guarantees to offer optimal performance, but instead have features that seek to ensure the greatest possible resistance in all kinds of situations.
That is why current mobiles are continuously subjected to endless tests to certify the endurance they show. One of the best known and most widespread degrees of protection among the community is called IP68, which is present in a large part of the launches that we see daily. However, not everyone knows the meaning of this kind of hardness and for this reason we are going to explain what exactly it consists of.
What does IP68 mean
First of all, before going into this matter in depth, it is necessary to clarify what the acronyms of this denomination refer to. They represent the “Ingress Protection”, that is, the degree of resistance they offer to the device. This protection is regulated by an international standard known as CEI 60529 Degrees of Protection and, in a nutshell, it is used to evaluate the hardness of the phone’s body under certain circumstances.
This certification is mandatory in almost the entire globe and companies must visibly indicate this property , which over time has become extremely relevant for users when making their purchase. However, there are more aspects that you should know about this particularity and that is that each of the digits that appears next to the IP acronym shows the degree of protection against two conditions that we will see below.
what the digits say
This IP resistance certificate is accompanied by two numbers next to it that say a lot about the tests carried out on the smartphone. Mainly, because the first of them indicates the level of protection against solid materials , while the second does the same with liquids .
Be careful, because hardness against solid materials does not mean that it shows firmness against blows against objects. This first digit has to do with the entry of substances such as dust particles and the greater the amount, the greater the protection. Specifically, the figure 6, the highest to date in terms of this class of materials, guarantees that the mobile is completely safe from the intrusion of particles such as dust, sand…
On the other hand, we have protection against liquid substances and the operation is exactly identical to the previous one, that is, a higher number means more resistance. An 8 shows that the terminal resists the entry of liquids into its interior and that it is capable of being submerged for a specific amount of time established by the brand in charge of manufacturing. In the event that your smartphone does not reach it, you will be interested to know that there are accessories to use the mobile in places such as the shower and enjoy your favorite series at all times.
Compared to the first digit, this second digit does feature a higher denomination known as 9K. A figure that indicates that the mobile withstands high pressure water jets at a short distance . However, the main companies in the industry do not have an alternative under this criterion in their catalog, since most of them tend to integrate an IP68 designation, although this does not mean by any means that there are no options that meet it.
