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Front Bezel (Real or Fake Aluminum)

I know its vain... but I scratched on the bezel of my 8525 the first day I bought it and staring at it is really starting to annoy me. Its the bezel part that starts above the call buttons and goes up the right side and then along the top.
Does anyone know if it is made from real brushed aluminum or is it plastic made to look like brushed aluminum? If its real, I'm going to dremel the scratch away... if its plastic and I try doing that... it will only make it much worse.
Thanks for any help on this.
EDIT: Does anyone have a dead 8525 or even just the front part they want to get rid of for cheap? I figure I could replace the bezel as well. Thanks again.

I'm not sure how does the fake plastic goes, but aluminum is a electric conductor, you can try and see if it gets electric passed through it? Still, fake plastic may be a conductor as well (i.e. uses aluminum powder to make it shiny). Anyway, if it was to be aluminum, it should be cold to the touch.
BTW, when you said "dremel the scratch away", how do you do that? I had a big one on my Wizard too, it is definitely aluminum here. Also, I have an old SStell watch that I would like to get the scratch off

Sure feels like METAL. One thing to fix smaller scratches on metal, try eraser for ink, it's slightly abrasive.

hanmin said:
I'm not sure how does the fake plastic goes, but aluminum is a electric conductor, you can try and see if it gets electric passed through it? Still, fake plastic may be a conductor as well (i.e. uses aluminum powder to make it shiny). Anyway, if it was to be aluminum, it should be cold to the touch.
BTW, when you said "dremel the scratch away", how do you do that? I had a big one on my Wizard too, it is definitely aluminum here. Also, I have an old SStell watch that I would like to get the scratch off
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I am fairly skillful with a dremel. I was thinking I would us a fine grained dremel brush and brush along the grain. Basically, it would be recessing that part of the bezel down to the depth of the scratch (it is uneven new and the scratch is located at a slightly elevated position which would be perfect for this). This would only work for slight scratches.

I know this
It dents like aluminum. I dropped mine last winter, and it put some scratches and dents int it... well the dents curve into the hole, which plastic would just shear and have a grooved edge, it wouldn't bend. So My vote is metal.

jompao said:
Sure feels like METAL. One thing to fix smaller scratches on metal, try eraser for ink, it's slightly abrasive.
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I hunting for an erasable ink pen right now. Thanks.

tsunami982 said:
I hunting for an erasable ink pen right now. Thanks.
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People use it to take care of small scratches on fine watches, so I'm guessing it will work here to. Obviously you need to use it direction of the "brushed" direction of the metal.
You can stumble on interesting stuf on the net.
I 've read people were removing branding from phones with a sugar cube. Abrasive enough to remove screen printed branding but not enough to scratch the plastic. Not to say that trick will work on Hermes.

Samsung Vibrant Bezel Painting

Is there any way to paint the smooth ugly silver bezel

Paint it a different color or repaint it because it got scratched?
Sent through the XDA App on my Samsung Vibrant running ICS Passion v10.6

I've painted mine. It's pretty easy. Make sure you get Krylon Fusion paint, its a paint formulated to stick to plastic better than regular sprays. Don't accept any of the store brand plastic paints either, I've tried the Lowe's one and it turned out to be pretty much regular paint.
Follow typical painting steps:
1. Take everything off (battery cover, sim, etc)
2. Mask the screen and backsides with tape + paper. The back is pretty easy to do with one long piece of tape, just wrap it around the whole backside. The screen you can lay 4 strips, 1 for each side, and then use a knife to score the edges and the tape will peel off.
3. Sand. Depending on how rough your edges are you may want to sand some nicks smooth. You don't need to remove the paint when you sand, you just need to get rid of the shine.
4. Paint. Follow the instructions on the can. The 2 most important things to remember are to do light coats and be freaking patient in between coats and touching it. Plan on watching a movie or doing something else. I used 3 coats on the front side, 2ish on the back. I can not stress this enough, if your coats are too heavy or you don't let each coat dry you will have a gummy, tacky result that will come off after a few days. Do it right, do it once.
5. Let it dry overnight or until you can't smell the paint anymore before regular usage.
Here are some pics, it's still drying but it turned out alright. The goop on the screen protector is from the tape. I'll get it off after the paint dries so I don't rub any paint off. IMO it looks worlds better than stock. I also had a few nicks around the edges and some of the chrome was falling off. As you might be able to tell from the pictures you can't notice any of the nicks or where the chrome was coming off.

scratched screen!

[reposted. previously posted to wrong group]
so much for gorilla glass!
probably something my 8yo daughter did.
it's small -- only a couple of mm, but it's there.
hell, i watched that youtube of the guy dragging a nail across his TF.
this wasn't supposed to happen, right?
anybody else got scratches?

Nothing is impossible. I have no clue how I personally haven't scratched mine. Bezel is filled with nicks but glass is fine. I wonder if you could use a small glass repair kit or something to fill it
Edit:
Something like this?
http://www.amazon.com/Stoner-95141-Invisible-Windshield-Repair/dp/B001T9CG94

munsterrr said:
Nothing is impossible. I have no clue how I personally haven't scratched mine. Bezel is filled with nicks but glass is fine. I wonder if you could use a small glass repair kit or something to fill it
Edit:
Something like this?
http://www.amazon.com/Stoner-95141-Invisible-Windshield-Repair/dp/B001T9CG94
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i've just put a cheapo screen protector on it that came with a case i bought. i hadn't bothered before, thinking that the glass was unscratchable. will source a higher quality one later.
let this be a cautionary tale to others -- especially if your kids are using yours.

theabsurdman said:
[reposted. previously posted to wrong group]
so much for gorilla glass!
probably something my 8yo daughter did.
it's small -- only a couple of mm, but it's there.
hell, i watched that youtube of the guy dragging a nail across his TF.
this wasn't supposed to happen, right?
anybody else got scratches?
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forum.ppcgeeks.com/moto-droid/114659-gorilla-glass-does-scratch-but-i-know-how-repair.html

It's probably from a grain of sand. Since that's one of the materials used to make glass...it will definitely scratch it.
I'd like to see some one take sand paper to the screen instead of keys and knives...that would be hilarious!
So basically...double check that the cloth you are using is free of Debris and I guess maybe blow some air on the screen first to get rid of any grainy particles?

Not as rugged as a Pantech Element, but mine has nicks on the bezel also. I put a nice screen protector on mine knowing that Im more capable than a kid of scratching it! You should upload pics of it so we can all get quezzy!
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

Must uh been the diamond ring.

:/ hmm why so emo?
besides if it was really strong enough for a real gorilla to use i doubt it would be sold at this price anyway. even bullet proof glass scratches >_>

hashbrown said:
Not as rugged as a Pantech Element, but mine has nicks on the bezel also. I put a nice screen protector on mine knowing that Im more capable than a kid of scratching it! You should upload pics of it so we can all get quezzy!
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk
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Love your avatar...why is his head so big? You gonna make biscuits?

Mine has scratches too, a lot small scratches on the bezel and a big one in the center. The big one is probably when the tablet was laying screen bottom on table with a lot of sugar and bread crumbs (I know, they shouldn't scratch gorilla glass). I just bought a matte protector and my screen doesn't look like a mirror anymore, scratches are almost invisible after that. It's also quite ugly, but more usefull than the shiny glass.

Magnesus said:
Mine has scratches too, a lot small scratches on the bezel and a big one in the center. The big one is probably when the tablet was laying screen bottom on table with a lot of sugar and bread crumbs (I know, they shouldn't scratch gorilla glass). I just bought a matte protector and my screen doesn't look like a mirror anymore, scratches are almost invisible after that. It's also quite ugly, but more usefull than the shiny glass.
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the matte protector i have now fitted has made my scratch completely invisible, at the expense of the screen being not so vivid; masks fingerprints too. i am going to leave it on for the present.

could you guys be kind enough to give a link for your purchased matte protector. thxsVM

gdeer80 said:
could you guys be kind enough to give a link for your purchased matte protector. thxsVM
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mine came as a freebie with a case i bought on ebay (item # 220937432912 ).
i messed up putting it on (bubbles) and have another on order. i'll let you know how the replacement works out when it arrives.

gdeer80 said:
could you guys be kind enough to give a link for your purchased matte protector. thxsVM
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Mine is a local brand, but probably it's some rebranded cheap protector from China. Still, it looks almost exactly like matte LCD screen. It doesn't have glue - from what I read you should avoid the ones that use glue.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=17414715
i posted my matt scfreen protector awhile ago with a pic of two transformers: one with and one without.
Sent from my Transformer TF101

quick update:
i removed my matt screen protector and replaced it with a clear (glossy) one. the new one, while it shows more fingerprints and reflections than the matt one, is preferable to me as the display is so much brighter and more vibrant. the matt one seemed 50% dimmer. the clear one was also easier to fit without bubbling (although it still took me 3 tries!). the brand i used was ebay # 370581513587.

After not being able to find a new glass, I did some research and "fixed" my scratched screen.
Gorilla Glass is an aluminium silicate glass. There is a product by 3M called "Perfect-it III Trizact Machine Glaze" (or 3M product no. 06070 if you prefer) that contains an aluminum silicate clay polishing compound. Its expensive! I got it at NAPA, quart-size bottle costs about $65. Probably can be found online for cheaper. Its intended purpose is removing extremely fine swirl marks from high-gloss auto finishes.. something the high-end auto detailer would use on a Ferrari or something.
Fisrt i tried by hand, polishing the screen with a polishing cloth coated in the polishing compound. This worked just fine for some of the very fine scratches, but took more effort than i figured.
I eventually switched to a very soft, small polishing wheel from a Dremel polishing kit. About 1.5-2" diameter. Used a variable speed drill at a slow-to-moderate speed, I carefully buffed the screen over the scratched areas, moving in small circles over the scratches for 45 seconds to a minute with a heavy coating of the 3M compound.
In the end it worked out pretty good! Most of the scratches are totally gone, and the worst of them is barely visible now and could probably be eliminated like the rest if i repeated the process a couple more times.
I hope this info helps. Just be careful, if you don't have any experience doing this kind of thing you can easily make your screen much worse. I practiced on my old and now retired Droid Eris which also sports Gorilla Glass before I attempted to touch my precious TF101.

a.mcdear said:
After not being able to find a new glass, I did some research and "fixed" my scratched screen.
Gorilla Glass is an aluminium silicate glass. There is a product by 3M called "Perfect-it III Trizact Machine Glaze" (or 3M product no. 06070 if you prefer) that contains an aluminum silicate clay polishing compound. Its expensive! I got it at NAPA, quart-size bottle costs about $65. Probably can be found online for cheaper. Its intended purpose is removing extremely fine swirl marks from high-gloss auto finishes.. something the high-end auto detailer would use on a Ferrari or something.
Fisrt i tried by hand, polishing the screen with a polishing cloth coated in the polishing compound. This worked just fine for some of the very fine scratches, but took more effort than i figured.
I eventually switched to a very soft, small polishing wheel from a Dremel polishing kit. About 1.5-2" diameter. Used a variable speed drill at a slow-to-moderate speed, I carefully buffed the screen over the scratched areas, moving in small circles over the scratches for 45 seconds to a minute with a heavy coating of the 3M compound.
In the end it worked out pretty good! Most of the scratches are totally gone, and the worst of them is barely visible now and could probably be eliminated like the rest if i repeated the process a couple more times.
I hope this info helps. Just be careful, if you don't have any experience doing this kind of thing you can easily make your screen much worse. I practiced on my old and now retired Droid Eris which also sports Gorilla Glass before I attempted to touch my precious TF101.
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Good info, thanks! Glad to hear theres a polish out there to fix the inevitable scratch.

Painted bezel / Zero-gap: Like? Dislike? Scrape it off?

The Moto X has an interesting glass front. The glass actually covers the entire face and "wraps" around the sides of the phone to the equator of the entire phone. This was commonly referred to as the "zero-gap" or "magic-glass" technology when I was first reading about the phone.
The bezel that we have appears to be painted onto the glass itself. Especially for people like me with the white face, the painted bezel effect really shows off a rather unsightly vertical gap between the painted bezel and the surface of the digitizer, which rests about .5 mm under the glass itself.
I wonder what the glass looks like under the painted bezel. If it was scraped off, do you think it would just be smooth glass enveloping the front of the phone? If so, I wonder why Motorola felt the need to paint the bezel on. That painted bezel looks really cheap to me.

I read rumors that it was wrap around glass but I really don't believe that to be the case - when tapping on it with a metal object, the "wrap around" area sounds distinctly plastic and on the top, you can actually see a distinct area where the plastic is taller than the glass that meets it.
It would be a lot more expensive to create a wrap-around glass piece than it would be to simply do some good plastic forming create tight bezels. I don't think it's glass at all - it's just plastic that's assembled with the glass to some tight tolerances.
Look here:
https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/KidY6tB4P22vESDH.huge
Looks/sounds/feels like plastic to me.

binary visions said:
I read rumors that it was wrap around glass but I really don't believe that to be the case - when tapping on it with a metal object, the "wrap around" area sounds distinctly plastic and on the top, you can actually see a distinct area where the plastic is taller than the glass that meets it.
It would be a lot more expensive to create a wrap-around glass piece than it would be to simply do some good plastic forming create tight bezels. I don't think it's glass at all - it's just plastic that's assembled with the glass to some tight tolerances.
Look here:
https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/KidY6tB4P22vESDH.huge
Looks/sounds/feels like plastic to me.
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I disagree. While the teardown picture shows what appears to be plastic, there appears to be an additional layer of something covering the outer rim. Check the bottom right (and even bottom left) corner(s) shown in the picture. In the alternative, the "wrapped" portion of the glass simply doesn't go as far as the equator.
I'm virtually certain there is some "wrapping" going on, largely due to the fact that I'm dealing with a white face. I will stake my life on the fact that there is no horizontal meeting between the glass and the bezel (on the flat portion of the face). I can actually see under the painted bezel and see no leading edge of plastic. The glass just goes until I can't see any further. I agree with you that it sounds like plastic when tapped with metal (I just tested it myself), but that can be easily explained by the mere fact that it is painted with some plastic-like substance.
Finally, I think your statement that the bezel is raised only supports the idea that the bezel is painted atop the surface of the glass. If it weren't, you could theoretically have it be level with the glass, though not necessarily. I really wish someone's teardown would show a close picture of the glass.

its not painted glass or wrap around glass. its a plastic bezel. i know becasue i can lift mine up with my fingernail

I have a white front too. At first I was too a bit angry about that shadow where glass touches the plastic/color, but I learned to live with it I don't really think it is just color. Maybe it's some really thin plastic bezel on top of the glass, but certainly not color. Try to look at some crashtests of Moto X. If you look at damaged bezel, you can see it's not just color but something more solid

eyc said:
I agree with you that it sounds like plastic when tapped with metal (I just tested it myself), but that can be easily explained by the mere fact that it is painted with some plastic-like substance.
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No, it wouldn't. Painting a glass surface with plastic doesn't make it resonate like plastic. Especially not at the thin layers we're talking about.
Finally, I think your statement that the bezel is raised only supports the idea that the bezel is painted atop the surface of the glass.
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To raise that tiny little piece of bevel on the top and bottom of the phone, and do all of this wrapping, would be very expensive since it would be pretty sophisticated forming, and from an engineering standpoint, it's a bad idea.
I'd lay money on it being plastic. Easy test, though - go ahead and scrape off your paint and we'll see. I'm not going to do it on mine, though, since it's plastic and will look like hell after that

murso74 said:
its not painted glass or wrap around glass. its a plastic bezel. i know becasue i can lift mine up with my fingernail
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Well, then. I stand corrected. What do you see when you lift it up? Does the glass extend a tad past the plastic bezel? I guess the plastic bezel is just really thin and tapers off into paper-thinness at the very edge where you see the glass.

eyc said:
Well, then. I stand corrected. What do you see when you lift it up? Does the glass extend a tad past the plastic bezel? I guess the plastic bezel is just really thin and tapers off into paper-thinness at the very edge where you see the glass.
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Honestly I can't really tell... Seems like plastic. I can slip my thumb nail between the side glasss and the plastic bezel, but I don't really want to pull to hard. I've been meaning to call moto about a replacement
Sent from my XT1058 using Tapatalk

This was one of their marketing things at launch it's zero gap where they "fused" the plastic bezel to the glass for that zero gap feel. The problem is that the bezel doesn't come all the way to the edge of the display so it does create an odd line. This is far more obvious on white than black on black it can only really been seen in direct sunlight.
"Motorola’s unique materials story continues on the front with a fused glass-plastic layer. The front glass and touch panel are fused into the plastic lip which rings the top side of the Moto X. They’re not separate parts, but literally fused together into one. Motorola is very proud of this feature since it results in one unbroken surface instead of the usual pressure-fit plastic ring affair with a raised section or gap."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7235/moto-x-review

It's plastic. I'm actually quite surprised it's being debated.
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

Losing silverness on the edge

Hello, even Samsung exchanged a new screen for me due to defective screen, within a few days I started seeing small dots in the edges between the glass screen and the silver edge. Is it due to some kind of oxidation or friction when I put the device in a bag? How to prevent such discoloration?

Can you post a screen shot?

Probably the same issues that plagues the bezel on the Note 3, as well as the S6's silver bezel around the camera. The silver colour is painted on, and it wears off fairly quickly, revealing the white plastic beneath.
What I always do is a solution us women have been using to keep our fake-silver rings looking silver for decades: blank nail polish. Simply apply a thin layer of blank nail polish on top of the bezel and it will erode much, much less. It acts as a protective layer.
To fix existing blemishes, you can use silver nail polish and a very, very thin brush.

ShadowLea said:
Probably the same issues that plagues the bezel on the Note 3, as well as the S6's silver bezel around the camera. The silver colour is painted on, and it wears off fairly quickly, revealing the white plastic beneath.
What I always do is a solution us women have been using to keep our fake-silver rings looking silver for decades: blank nail polish. Simply apply a thin layer of blank nail polish on top of the bezel and it will erode much, much less. It acts as a protective layer.
To fix existing blemishes, you can use silver nail polish and a very, very thin brush.
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Thanks. For the silver nail polish, is there a specific brand/model number or anything like that will do? If I want a pink bezel, I just get a pink nail polish?

petercohen said:
Thanks. For the silver nail polish, is there a specific brand/model number or anything like that will do? If I want a pink bezel, I just get a pink nail polish?
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Make sure it's a long-lasting one. Personally I always use L'oreal, but if that's not available in the right colour, Max Factor or Rimmel will do as well.
Yep, if you use pink, it'll turn pink. It's a coating, so you can use any you want. So if you don't like the silver and would prefer black, you get a black one. (those are available in gloss and matte)
We also do this to paint back covers, suitcases, keys, cables (to colourcode them), blemishes on shoes... I've used nail polish on pretty much everything.. except my nails! :laugh:
The advantage of using Nail polish over dye is that you can simply wipe it off with acetone and a cotton swab if you don't like how it looks. (acetone is nail polish remover. You can usually find it within 3 meters of the nail polish stand in a pharmacy.)

Just to make sure that we are talking about the same issue, I am enclosing two photos.

It's funny what we OCD on . . I'm looking at that and thinking you're crazy but at the same time when I approach my car from the passenger side every day the first thing I look at is the ding in the door that my son put into it a year ago . . So while I personally wouldn't fret over this issue on my own tablet since I get full enjoyment out of it daily I feel your pain when you say it's an issue for you.