disclaimer: I have not lab tested these product against the coronavirus so I don’t know if they kill coronavirus.
Up until recent times, people ridiculed the likes of PhoneSoap (amazon affiliate link) for reasons like”who really needs an expensive sanitizer for a phone”? Then coronavirus happened and business picked up for in this niche market of UV sanitization products. In an interview with CNN, co-founder Dan Barnes says that the revenue so far this month [March] is about 20 times higher than in the same period last year (CNN).
As of writing this article, most of their products are in pre-order, with their biggest Sanitizer box showing “ships before September 10th”.
And as of now, the official statement on “does it really kill Coronavirus” remains the same i.e. we can’t test it but it is similar to a virus that we know PhoneSoap kills.
Only organizations like the CDC and those working to contain COVID-19 have access to this novel strain of coronavirus to test, so PhoneSoap has not tested and therefore, cannot claim that our products kill COVID-19. That being said, we do know that coronavirus is an enveloped virus, similar to Influenza A (H1N1) which we have tested and know that PhoneSoap kills at a 99.99% reduction rate.
We believe that phone and hand hygiene are inseparably connected and that keeping your phone sanitized is just as important as washing your hands, particularly at this time.
The $80, $120, 200 etc price tag may seem huge but, granted you believe they work, UV sanitization may be be cheaper in the long run.
For example, if you need to go to work 5 days a week, I would say it is fair to have 5 N95 masks – one for each days you go to work. I am obviously assumes that you safely store away your mask after work each day and don’t use it until next week. If you have some form of sanitization box, you can cut the cost of having to buy multiple mask. You can essentially sanitize a mask within 3-5 minutes (depending on the product). This means, you could potentially use 1 single mask every day.
Then there is the fact that you can fit in keys, credit cards, glasses, etc into these sanitization boxes. By using a sanitization box, at the bare minimum you’re saving some soap or getting some level level of assurance on safety. Now, if you buy a bigger sanitization box, you might be able to sanitize bigger items like tablets and even laptops.
One big issue with this technology is that you can’t stack up items. If you stack things up inside the box, UV light won’t be hitting the items that are in between. This means you can’t sanitization all of your mail at once. You can still sanitize your mails one at a time though but if you get a whole bunch of mails, it might take a while to sanitize them all. For most part, I personally choose to let mails sit idle (in an isolated location) for several days before opening them.
An example of a one of the few big sanitization that you can currently buy is the one from 59S (amazon affiliate link). As pictured above, it is big enough to fit in a N95 mask and a big phone like V60. In the picture below, you can also see that it is more than big to fit in a LG Velvet with dual screen. This particular product from 59S comes with a charger of its own and has magnets and zips to ensure safety.
UV Sanitizer from 59S 
sanitizing LG Velvet (shot on LG V60)
Closing Thoughts
More or less all of these products work the same way. If you are interested in buying a UV sanitizer, I urge you to lookup some youtube videos to see which one you like. Beware of the new and/or fake brands that were practically created a month or two ago to milk on the booming market of UV sanitizer.
