It is rarely something you focus on when looking at a spec sheet, but the ability to survive a fall is one of the more important things a smartphone or tablet has to do nowadays. While you can help make your device more durable with cases or glass screen covers, in a perfect world the gadget you bought would be able to survive just because it was designed to do so.
Corning has been a big name is smartphone and tablet glass for a long time now with their Gorilla Glass offerings, and the latest update to this product line (predictably called Gorilla Glass 4) claims superior survival rates for devices that are dropped on asphalt or concrete.
You can usually tell when your phone is toast. That sick feeling you get in your gut when the phone vibrates itself off of a tall counter or goes tumbling out of your jacket pocket onto the sidewalk. Even when it has landed face down, deep down you know there’s going to be a spider’s web of cracks all over your screen when you pick it up. Corning has been doing a ton of research into determining how to defend against these drops, which they say happen most frequently on gritty surfaces like concrete sidewalks and asphalt roads. The answer, according to Corning, can be found in Gorilla Glass 4.
Gorilla Glass 4 is boasting an 80% survival rate against sharp surface impacts, which they claim is twice as good as any of the competition. To demonstrate their survivability, Corning’s massive drop test machine hurls these panels at the ground from one meter up and shows off how the glass isn’t broken. This kind of survival rate is a big deal for everyone, since a broken screen on a smartphone is pretty much public enemy number one when it comes to broken phones.
This will undoubtedly be a feature we see show up on smartphones next year, and likely serves as a functional alternative to thesapphire glass that was so highly rumored to show up on this year’s iPhone 6.
If Corning can get us one step closer to never having that sick feeling in your gut when a phone hits the ground, consumers will want it and probably search it out on their next handset. In the mean time, be sure to grip your current phone extra tight.