Corning Gorilla Glass 5 Coming To Devices Later This Year

[DroidModderX]

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Over the years Corning has made it their mission to make the most durable glass for cellular devices. They have come a long way since the first devices however Glass still breaks when you drop your phone. Gorilla Glass 4 was Corning's first attempt at building glass durable enough to handle drops onto rough surfaces. The next iteration looks to improve further in this specific category.

According to Corning the new Gorilla Glass 5 will survive a 5 foot drop onto rough surfaces (ie sandpaper for their tetsing) 80% of the time. This means 4 out of 5 drops will survive. Gorilla Glass 4 while more durable when it comes to drops was also the most scratch prone glass I have ever used. I have right now 3 nasty deep scratches in which I have no clue how they got there. I am hoping that Gorilla Glass 5 will also improve on the scratch resistance.

 

[FoxKat]

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Over the years Corning has made it their mission to make the most durable glass for cellular devices. They have come a long way since the first devices however Glass still breaks when you drop your phone. Gorilla Glass 4 was Corning's first attempt at building glass durable enough to handle drops onto rough surfaces. The next iteration looks to improve further in this specific category.

According to Corning the new Gorilla Glass 5 will survive a 5 foot drop onto rough surfaces (ie sandpaper for their tetsing) 80% of the time. This means 4 out of 5 drops will survive. Gorilla Glass 4 while more durable when it comes to drops was also the most scratch prone glass I have ever used. I have right now 3 nasty deep scratches in which I have no clue how they got there. I am hoping that Gorilla Glass 5 will also improve on the scratch resistance.

I love that Glass is becoming so incredibly resilient and strong. I do want to point out one thing though... I have seen enough broken screens to know that many times the break doesn't happen as a result of the flat front of the glass actually making contact with the impact surface whether it's asphalt or otherwise. Many, if not most of the screen shatters happen with an edge contact, and in those cases it's often the metal frame surrounding the glass that comes in contact with the glass edge, due to being deformed upon impact which causes the fracture. It's easy enough to see by simply looking at the pattern of fracture in the images of broken screens. I did a Google image search of "Broken phone screen" and there are a significant number that look like this;

In each case where I've had a screen shatter in this home (my son's phone 3 times, my wife's once, and mine once), they were all edge fractures. Think of it this way. In order for the screen to land flat, the phone has to be oriented exactly in a horizontal plane, i.e. 0 degrees rotation (plus or minus maybe 5 degrees). Anything lower (354 degrees or less), or higher (6 degrees or more), and it is an edge impact. The chance that a phone lands face down is so much lower than landing in any other orientation.

There are an overwhelming number more showing direct impact in the center of the screen, but those are mostly advertisements for screen repair and I would bet many were deliberately broken for the advertisement and to be "impacting" (no pun intended). Any which have spidering from an edge or corner prove that the impact to the glass was on the edge where it was cut and that is where ALL glass is most vulnerable to fracturing. I want to see them develop a way to reduce edge impact stress to minimize those types of fractures. Polishing edges does a lot to minimize this but it seems there could be more done. Also, manufacturers should be able to strengthen the metal surrounding the glass and help prevent edge fractures.