Corning – the New York-based company behind Gorilla Glass – recently announced that their newest version will start rolling out later this month. Gorilla Glass 5 is said to be their toughest variety to date, able to survive a fall of 1.6m(~5.2ft) about 80% of the time. That’s roughly shoulder-height for most adults.
The upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is already confirmed to feature Gorilla Glass 5, and Apple is rumored to be in talks about using it for the iPhone 7 as well. And since previous Gorilla Glass products have already been used in more than 4.5 billion devices worldwide, it’s a safe bet that many other manufacturers have their eyes turned this way.
Sooner or later, almost everyone drops their phone. A recent global study suggests that it happens to 85% of smartphone owners at least once per year – and that 55% will drop theirs 3 times or more in that period! But with Gorilla Glass, Corning is doing their best to make shattered screens a thing of the past.
What’s Special About Gorilla Glass?
When you think of the word “glass”, what you’re probably thinking of is a specific type of glass called soda lime glass. This is the material that windows, bottles, and jars are most commonly made of, and it’s created by melting down sand or similar mineral clusters.
Soda lime glass is cheap and easy to make, but – as anyone who has ever dropped a glass jar knows – it doesn’t take much force to crack or shatter it. If your phone’s screen were made of this stuff, it would probably break all the time.
Making Gorilla Glass is a complex process, and Corning describes it in detail on their website. In a nutshell, the raw glass is bathed in molten potassium salt, where an ion-exchange process removes small sodium ions and replaces them with larger potassium ions, which are pressed extremely close together. The result is a scratch- and a crack-resistant sheet of crystal clear glass: perfect for smartphone and tablet screens.
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