[Sony Xperia P, U, Sola, Go] mrsatan:
Yeah if I put my face up to the screen during direct sunlight I can just make out tiny scratches. Some of them are not permanent and some clearly are. The screen has been very good vs heavy scratches, but still gets light scratches like every other phone screen I have had. If you were to put a screen protector on you wouldnt even notice the scratches. Light scratches will always happen and it doesnt really bother me unless I can see them.

Edit: I did receive a free Spigen screen protector so I will try it out and see if I like it or not just for the hell of it. Generally though I prefer the naked screen and even my old hero with gorilla glass 1 came through just fine except for the minute almost imperceptible scraches.

Folks, Gorilla Glass is a marketing ploy. It doesn't offer any real scratch resistance over normal glass, but the compound it's made of makes it less likely to shatter (two different things). When it comes to scratch resistance, you're looking at the Mohs scale.

Mohs scale of mineral hardness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You may be more familiar with this than you think. Diamond is a 10, the hardest substance known to man. Diamond can only be scratched by another diamond or a laser.

Glass has a rating of 6-7, depending on the hardness of the glass. Plastic is a 3-4.

If you take your keys over a glass screen (or a glass window), touch it to the surface, and rub with a little pressure (just enough to gain a degree of resistance), you WILL NOT scratch the glass. I've even scared the crap out of someone by hacking at my Zune HD's screen with a carbon-steel steak knife, and not a scratch.

So what will cause you to scratch your glass screen? Two things;

-a softer material (like metal) and force, not resistance. Yes, if you slam something into the screen, it may very well get a small crack, small enough that we see it as a scratch. Because, while glass is very scratch resistant, it easily shatters. It's force that gives us those small "scratches."

-dirt/sand - Sand (quartz sand, specifically) is an active ingredient in glass. If you get small particles of sand or other types of dirt on the screen and then wipe it off with your shirt (or even a microfiber cloth), you can develop small scratches in your screen. The most annoying is those who wipe with a circular motion, as it leaves rings in the screen. Want to avoid this? Take a SMALL amount of Endust for Electronics and a paper towel and gently wipe off the screen. The liquid will act as a buffer between the screen and the dirt. Then, take a microfiber cloth (those little eyeglass cleaning cloths that come with screen protectors) and wipe off the residue left by the Endust and any pieces of the paper towel.

When you use a quality screen protector (SGP, Clarivu, Martin Fields), you're putting a plastic overlay over the phone. While this will scratch more easily than the glass screen, if applied correctly, it acts as a shock absorber, thus making it harder for the screen to shatter. It protects from scratches by taking the scratches itself, and it protects from shattering by absorbing the force of the blow.

The wet applications like the Invisible Shield are so thin that they don't noticeably increase shatter resistance. They'll just keep the screen together when shattered. The Invisible Shield is harder to scratch though, making it so that you don't have to replace it as often (it looks nicer longer than a normal plastic screen protector). Basically, it protects from scratches by deflecting them, but doesn't offer any real shock absorption.

Gorilla glass claims a hardness of 9 on Mohs scale which is utter bs. It realistically has a hardness of about 7-7.5 max. Normal glass can range from 6-7.2 depending on the type. Diamond is 10 and Sapphire is 9 which is what the make high end watch faces out of but is damn expensive. If Gorilla Glass was a 9 then they would use it for the watch faces since it is much much cheaper. I have a Citizen watch that has sapphire and the face is scratched as **** because I have had it for 12 years.

Remember as long as the scratches are the insanely small type caused by sand grains and such, you can easily get some special polish and buff those right out. The one nice thing about our screens not having oleophobic coating is you dont have to worry about damaging the coating when you polish it.

The best way for a manufacturer to reduce scratches is to put a chin on the phone like the Hero had. This way the phone screen never touches the ground.