Protect Your OnePlus 7 Pro at the Beach

An afternoon on the beach may be a relaxing summer outing for you, but it could be a rough time for your OnePlus 7 Pro. You want to come back from your day in the sun feeling refreshed—not upset that your new phone is mysteriously on the fritz. Read these simple tips for keeping your OnePlus 7 Pro safe from sand, heat, water and people with sticky fingers.

Sand

Sand gets everywhere. It can even find its way into your pricey tech if you’re not careful. One of the first things you need to do to beach-proof your phone is to get dust plugs to block the most vulnerable areas: the ports. If even a few grains slip in there, they could wreak a lot of internal damage.

The OnePlus 7 Pro performed well on a JerryRigEverythingdurability test where the unprotected touchscreen was scratched with Mohs picks. With a Corning Gorilla Glass touchscreen, only minerals with a Mohs level of 6 left faint marks and then 7 left noticeable grooves. This is good news when it comes to house keys and loose change, but not for sand. Sand (quartz) has a Mohs level of 7. It’s abrasive enough to cause visible damage.

To save the exterior of your phone, you should get a screen protector and a 3M vinyl skin before you go lounging on the beach. The high-grade materials will stop sand from scraping up the surface beyond recognition. You can always take the opportunity to customize your OnePlus 7 Pro with eye-catching designs and shades like bulletproof banana carbon fiber, gold, bamboo and black dragon scale.

Heat

Letting your phone sit on your towel or on your car’s dashboard to cook in the sun is a move that you’ll come to regret. It can damage your battery, slow down your device’s performance and corrupt its data.

One of the ways you can stop your phone from overheating while you’re on the beach is to keep it out of the sun, preferably in a bag. Don’t run a lot of battery-draining apps. If you can, put the phone on airplane mode or shut it down for a while.

Water

The bad news is that the OnePlus 7 Pro doesn’t have an IP rating — this means that it has no definitive rating for its dust-resistance or water-resistance. OnePlus defended their decision to skip the rating because they wanted to save their customers money and released a video dunking the phone into water to prove that it’s fine without the test.

The good news is that tech enthusiasts have run their own water-resistance tests for the OnePlus 7 Pro to see if it still functions properly after sitting underwater for 30 minutes. The YouTuber Timmers EM1 found that the camera and the touchscreen worked fine after the experiment. The speakers were muffled at first but returned to normal. The fingerprint reader needed to be dried off to work properly.

The success of the at-home test doesn’t mean that you should chuck your device into a body of water and feel confident that it will come out perfect. Chemicals, sand and salt can all wreak havoc on your tech.

An easy way to protect your OnePlus 7 Pro at the beach when you’re hanging out close to the water, or when you’re swimming right in it, is to use a sealable sandwich bag. Make sure that there are no holes in the bag and that it has a tight seal. If that’s leaving too much up to chance, keep it in your bag and away from the water.  

Thieves

You don’t want to go for a quick dip in the water or for a walk to grab an ice cream cone and come back to your beach towel to see that your valuables have been stolen. If it’s a crowded beach, there’s no way to tell who took your stuff, and likely no security to help you get it back.

Before you head on the trip, you should take a look at some of the best portable lock boxes to keep your valuables safe from anyone with wandering eyes or sticky fingers. You can put your OnePlus 7 Pro, your wallet, your keys and anything else that you’d think would interest a thief in there.

Now, a thief can still take a lockbox if you’re not paying attention. You’ll be relieved that they can’t break into it, but it’s still not ideal to be stuck at the beach, sopping wet without your car keys or phone. One of the most effective ways to prevent beach theft is never to leave your valuables unguarded —always make sure that one friend is watching your stuff. Swimming and grabbing snacks in shifts may feel excessive, but it’s better than getting robbed.

Everyone accepts that good times at the beach require a little frustration. You’re going to come home with sand between every crevice, with awkward tan lines and tangled hair. Your car is going to be a mess that you’ll be vacuuming for weeks. Traffic on the way home will probably be a nightmare. But as long as you had a good time and your valuables are in-tact, it will be well worth the trip.