Polarized glasses problem
Newbie here with the same problem. I think when I type...so please excuse the length of post.
My wife just got the 5 today at Verizon (launch day). She upgraded from the 4, noticed the strange glare. She accepted the problem, because she was already used to seeing strange artifacts/glares show up on some surfaces when using her polarized glasses. I don't find about this until later.
Fast forward 10 hours, I bump into my friend at the Apple store returning his 5. He mentions the problem, says he had the issue with his polarized glasses and his 4, and Apple swapped it out with one that didn't have the glare.
30 minutes later, my wife arrives at the mall to meet me. I mention my friend's problem, she said that she noticed that, then decides to swap her phone too. When we get to the Apple store, the manager listens to us, but is reluctant to let us return the phone, saying that it's not a manufacturing defect, and that it's not Apple's fault that she uses polarized glasses. He was actually very nice about it, and I could see where he was coming from. I'm not really good at accepting "no", so our polite debate continued for a few minutes. He eventually agreed to swap out the phone, but pointed out that if we did, VZ probably wouldn't accept any returns on a swapped phone, and we may have the same problem with the new one.
I decided to do some of my own research online, but didn't find a likeable answer or solution...so I went back into the store.
I counted all the new phones on display, then put my wife's glasses on and peered over each customer's shoulder to see what the ratio of good to bad glass was. Turns out that about 50% of them had the glare, and the rest were fine. It didn't matter if it was white or black. (I must have creeped some people out wearing women's sunglasses at night, in the Apple store)
Now I know that VZ would probably replace my wife's phone if we took it back, so the chances of me getting a good screen were pretty good. If I got a bad phone again, I could probably now go back to the Apple store and swap it out. With a 50/50 chance, statistically I'll find one good screen out of the three phones.
I left Apple without swapping the phone. I'll go to VZ tomorrow. I just hope they have some available!
On the way out of the mall, I see another friend that just bought some Oakley polarized sunglasses. I asked if I could try looking at my wife's phone, and noticed that I saw the same glare through his glasses. My conclusion was that it wasn't the polarized glass, it probably is the phone screen.
My last finding was that if you rotated the bad screen by 45 degrees to the left or right, it would look fine through the polarized glasses. If you rotated the good screen by 45 degrees to the left or right, you'd see the glare. Basically, I believe that somewhere in the manufacturing process, some of the glass gets installed one way or the other. I suppose that figuring out every possible thing that could go wrong is unreasonable.
I really like Apple, and this isn't going to stop me from buying their products...for now, I just have to figure out how to get a phone that works with my wife's glasses from right now until the iphone 6 comes out...or tell my wife to tilt her head by 45 degrees when she wants to check her phone while wearing her glasses.
These are my personal thoughts based on my amateur research. I'm not pointing any blame, just sharing with the hopes of it helping.
Oh yeah. I tried calling my buddy DN to see if he got his phone replaced, but he hasn't called back...so I don't know. This was fresh in my mind so I thought it would be better to write it down today...Now, off to my bottle of bourbon.
