Corning Announces Gorilla Glass 6 for Smartphones, Doubles Durability
by Anton Shilov on July 20, 2018 11:59 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Corning
- Gorilla Glass
Corning this week introduced its next-generation Gorilla Glass 6 cover glass for smartphones that promises to double durability when compared to its predecessor. The manufacturer says that the first devices that will use the protective glass will hit the market already in the coming months.
According to Corning, its Gorilla Glass 6 is an entirely new material “chemically strengthened to higher levels of compression” and designed to sustain multiple drops throughout a lifetime of a device. The substrate is designed for phones that use glass for more than 85% of their enclosure surface, so the Gorilla Glass 6 is claimed to be a better fit for handsets with displays featuring an 18:9 or 19:9 display aspect ratio than the company’s previous-gen Gorilla Glass 5.
According to a research by Toluna, which is cited by Corning, people drop their phones seven times a year and over 50% of these drops occur at one meter or below. The manufacturer claims that Gorilla Glass 6 survived 15 drops from 1 meter onto rough surfaces, which was two times better than results demonstrated by Gorilla Glass 5.
Corning says that its Gorilla Glass 6 has been evaluated by multiple customers and the latter are expected to use it in commercial products in the coming month. Although Corning does not disclose names of its clients, but logical candidates to use Gorilla Glass 6 are companies who launch their leading-edge products in the second half of the year.
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Source: Corning
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babadivad - Friday, July 20, 2018 - link
Gorilla Glass 3 was the last great gorilla glass. It was the only one I was able to forgo using a screen protector on my phone.Spoelie - Monday, July 23, 2018 - link
+1Resistance against drops is one thing, but scratch resistance is equally as important, if not more so.
I had an HTC one with gorilla glass 3 which was near flawless after 2y, while this s9 with gg5 shows a good deal of mini scratches after only 3 months.
I do try to keep small change and keys seperate, but the occasional scuff is not avoidable.
notashill - Monday, July 23, 2018 - link
Luckily there are still some new phones being made with GG3, i.e. the recent Nokia models.Gunbuster - Friday, July 20, 2018 - link
Or instead of trying to engineer your way out of glass cracking maybe just lay off slathering on the back of phones in the first place.PeachNCream - Friday, July 20, 2018 - link
Hey buddy! Hey! This is Anandtech where slapping glass on the back of your phone results in a premium feeling. Ignore the reality of breakage and the necessity of hiding said glass under a cheap rubberized or plastic case. If you disagree, you need to go back to the Best Phones article for Q3 2018 where that fact is clearly shoved down your throat sideways."An alternative to the 7X in Europe is the Honor 9 Lite which comes with the same hardware internals at a similar price of £199 / 199€ and comes in a much more premium feeling glass design."
close - Friday, July 20, 2018 - link
If it's any consolation most tech editors these days swing dissonantly between opinions and can't decide what's more "premium" between metal or glass, what's useful and what's a gimmick between notches, fingerprint sensor placement, face unlock, and such.Come back next year, who know what they'll be praising then.
The last time someone on AT actually pointed out that glass is not the best thing to make a phone out of was probably Anand in the iPhone 4 review 8 years ago.
"Only Apple would think to make the two surfaces most likely to hit something out of glass. It's like making mouse traps out of cheese, something bad is bound to happen."
peevee - Friday, July 20, 2018 - link
Of course Anand was not correct, as the first hit practically always happens at the corner.emn13 - Saturday, July 21, 2018 - link
Or, you know, they could pick a material for the frame that actually *is* premium, rather than faking it like metal and glass. It's rare stuff, but you may have heard of it... "plastic". Shockingly, it's both largely shatterproof and RF transparant - wow right? Best yet, it comes in any color, and in lots of varieties, giving manufacturer's real flexibility.philehidiot - Saturday, July 21, 2018 - link
Myself I hate the glass thing. I firmly believe it's to please the only people who don't use a phone without a case - the journalists reviewing it and thus encouraging sales as it "feels great". I recently saw an iphone which was <2 years old and was utterly destroyed due to drops, etc. Not using a case on a phone which is so damned expensive and taken out of a pocket several tens of times a day is just madness. I had a couple of HTCs made of metal (M7 and M9) and they survived quite happily without a case. Sure a couple of drops left their marks but they didn't induce major cracks down the screen, just dents. You use these things daily and they'll get worn - see for example a car which gets little chips in the paint from the road but it is made of such material that it doesn't lead to real damage or dysfunction. Same with a wallet - you expect little scratches but if it fell apart after dropping it or got destroyed by your car key being in the same pocket you'd be raging and rightly so. Phones these days are made with sensible materials if they're cheaper but the top of the range ones (which are more likely to be used a lot because the people who buy them are computer / data whores) are made to break. It's outright disgusting. This glass should be used on screens but the rest of the phone needs to be made of something else - a decent metal or a decent plastic. I've had HTC phones made of both and they were fine without stupid cases in my clumsy hands.BedfordTim - Friday, July 20, 2018 - link
It is meant to crack so you buy a new phone. Why else would you use a heavy fragile material.