STK Glaze Tempered Shield for Samsung Galaxy S4 review

The STK Glaze Tempered Shield is designed to protect the vulnerable screen of your Samsung Galaxy S4.

You stick the scratch- and impact-resistant cover onto your S4’s screen, and it will not only protect the S4’s display from damage, but will also act as a sacrificial layer; the Shield should break instead of the S4’s screen, and will be significantly cheaper to replace.

Our resident Galaxy S4 owner wouldn’t let us borrow his personal phone to test to destruction, so we instead tried the Shield out with an HTC Hero. The Hero’s touchscreen worked perfectly with the Shield stuck on.

We then hit the Shield-equipped HTC Hero with a hammer. The Shield shattered, but underneath the Hero was fine.

As a control, we then removed the Shield and hit the Hero with a hammer with a similar amount of force. The Hero’s screen still refused to break, and even survived a further hammer blow.

We then put the Shield back on the Hero and hit it as hard as we could. The Hero then shattered underneath the Shield, but this was a truly absurd amount of force to subject a phone to, and the Shield was weakened by our previous attempts.

The aftermath…

For this reason we’re not sure how much protection the Shield will offer. We feel it will help with small drops to the floor and with scratching, but it does seem to be significantly weaker than the phone display it’s meant to protect.