Nowadays, a smartphone is basically a piece of glass that we take to and fro. And, as we know, glass breaks! But Corning, the company responsible for creating the glasses used by Apple and several other manufacturers, wants to change this paradigm.
Today, the company launched the Gorilla Glass Victus, which will most likely equip most smartphones we know. In short, glasses work like this: when you improve the resistance to falls, they become more fragile to scratches – and vice versa. Now, for the first time, Corning says it has managed to significantly improve both drop and scratch resistance! ??
Falling phones can result in broken phones, but as we developed better glass, the phones survived more falls, but also showed more visible scratches, which can affect the usability of the devices. Instead of our historic approach of asking our technologists to focus on a single goal – improving glass for falls or scratches – we asked them to focus on improving for falls and scratches, and they delivered it with Gorilla Glass Victus.
–John Bayne, senior vice president and general manager for mobile devices
According to a survey by Corning in the three largest smartphone markets in the world (China, India and the United States), durability is one of the most important purchase considerations, second only to the device’s brand – staying ahead of features such as screen size , camera quality and device thickness, for example. Still according to the company, consumers are even willing to pay more for a more durable device – the price of the new glass, however, should not be much different from that of Gorilla Glass 6 for manufacturers.
Corning also analyzed feedbacks from more than 90,000 consumers and concluded that resistance to falls and scratches has almost doubled in the past seven years.
The good news is that, in laboratory tests, Gorilla Glass Victus managed to survive drops of up to 2 meters even when falling on hard and rough surfaces – normally, glass from other manufacturers cannot resist when they fall more than 0.8m, according to Corning. Gorilla Glass Victus is also up to 2x more resistant to scratches than Gorilla Glass 6 (until then the best glass created by the company) and up to 4x better than competitor glasses.
Today’s announcement is important as Corning is the supplier of more than 45 major brands – the company’s glass has been used in more than 8 billion devices sold throughout history. In its statement, the company said that Samsung will be the first to launch a device with Gorilla Glass Victus «in the very near future».
Good news, isn’t it? We hope that Apple will also use the new glass on their devices!
via The Verge
