A good quality skin should be cleanly removable, so unless the phone skin is much cheaper, there’s not much benefit to practicing on the phone first. I wouldn’t worry so much.
Also sorry for randomly info-dumping that wall of text, oh god. I tend to do that when I’m obsessed with something haha ^^"
The screen protector you see on mine is the second one because I fumbled the first and it still has bubbles. So as someone who also struggles with screen protectors: it’s not the same.
Yes, it has a lot more pieces, some of which are quite thin and fragile and you need more patience to follow the instructions properly and the whole process takes a lot longer, which may seem daunting.
But the material is so, so much more forgiving than the average screen protector.
First of all, it’s not transparent, so trapping some stuff that doesn’t have much height like fine dust and fingerprints is not an issue, since you can’t see it.
This means that you don’t have to drop everything into place perfectly on the first try. Because a small amount of fingerprints is not an issue, you can fumble around with it a lot more. Because fine dust is not an issue, you can also take your time doing it.
Secondly, even if you do trap larger pieces of dust, unlike rigid screen protectors that create a huge penny-sized bubble dome around it, skins are meant to wrap tightly around complex shapes, so in my case I just have a teenie tiny bump exactly the size of the dust + skin thickness, which is barely noticeable.
The glue on my skin also seems different and more forgiving to ripping and reapplying. In particular, you can reposition things a lot of times before pressing down to fixate it for good. So you can e.g. fixate one side, then lightly drape the skin across to match the cutouts on the other side, then fixate that side, and then smooth out the middle parts.
Which takes us to bubbles. Whenever the flat skin doesn’t fit the 3D shape 100%, you’ll get a lot of wrinkles and bubbles and that is totally fine. With the hairdryer, you can melt the material into place and most of my bubbles disappeared completely. The few that didn’t turned into tiny creases at the ends. I think this is the only imperfection to expect. It’s really hard not to get any creases and you don’t get more tries here because you need to press down to smooth out the bubbles, so you can’t reapply.
But that’s it. Everything else can be repositioned until it’s perfect, so the only thing it really takes is patience.
Hey, I asked for them, so they are solicited!
Dang, I need to give it a try. I’ve been wary of RSI with the super fast games, didn’t know it was possible to have hard levels without destroying my hands.
Looks sick, man. How’s Rhythm Heaven? Recently got back into rhythm games myself.
EasySkinz. They had some pretty good discounts during black friday when I got it
Neat motif! Did you use heat? My skin came with instructions to use a hairdryer and the skin kind of just melted into place with some careful strokes. If you haven’t done so, maybe you can try that on an inconspicuous area?
It’s metallic blue when you look directly at it and turns more purple as you look more from the side
Stray. It’s an absolute feast on the eyes on the OLED deck’s screen. Something about the way it pulls off the subtle hue shifts in the game and the high contrast is just better than on 2 different PC monitors I’ve tried, my (arguably cheap) TV or even my (not-so-cheap and also OLED) phone. You just have to try and see for yourself to get it.
I’ve also gotten back into rhythm games. Been playing Project Diva and Thumper as well lately.
Before getting the Deck, I pretty much gave up on gaming because I started working fulltime remotely and I didn’t want to just continue sitting on the same desk after work and continue gaming there. It’s bad for my physical and mental health.
Since getting my OLED end of November, I’ve been playing an average of 3h per day despite fulltime work and spending holidays with family and friends… oops :D
I think it will definitely go down once the honeymoon phase is over, but its impact is already made. Through it I’ve found a new way to fit an old hobby back into my life.
I’m also using it to watch stuff on TV in docked mode. The portable format is just perfect for it.
The game doesn’t support the touch screen :( but will look for plugins in that direction, thanks