Gorilla Glass 5 — How To Survive A Mean Punch

An insurance package against fumbles

Samsung Galaxy Note7, before its sad demise, was one of the first phones to have a Corning Gorilla Glass 5. The new glass was formulated to improve drop performance of gadgets dropped onto rough surfaces from measured heights — specifically, from waist height or even shoulder height! Selfie-fumblers rejoice: Corning says Gorilla Glass 5 survives up to 80 percent of the time when dropped from 1.6 meters.

We’d written an excellent article on Gorilla Glass 5 when it was still in the works and wasn’t commercially available. You should read it. It explains a lot of the technique and the innovation behind this seemingly innocuous invention.

The new glass is the successor to Corning Gorilla Glass 4, which was introduced in the fall of 2014 (no pun intended). Gorilla Glass 4 was said to be twice as tough as it predecessor and twice as likely to survive drops onto uneven surfaces.

Without compromising any other features of the well-known screen glass, Corning claims that Gorilla Glass 5 can take drops from five feet off the ground onto “hard, rough surfaces” with an 80% survival rate! That’s substantially better than competitive glass coverings, and also an improvement over Gorilla Glass 4 that you’ll find on the Galaxy Note 5.

According to a study cited by Corning, over 85 percent of smartphone users have dropped their phones at least once per year, while 55 percent have dropped their devices three or more times. That’s why, Corning says, that it focused it’s time around on improving Gorilla Glass’s drop resistance. What’s particularly important about this upgrade is that the Note7 uses Gorilla Glass 5 on the back of the phone as well, which is the side most likely to take daily abuse and harder impacts.

When asked if Gorilla Glass 5 possesses the same scratch resistant properties as Gorilla Glass 4, it was concluded that it does; but is not any better than its predecessor. While Gorilla Glass 5 might have been tailored to protect the display from a height of 1.6 meters, the same proportional effect cannot be said for its scratch-resistant properties. But that’s okay, really. Gorilla Glass 4 was very very good at preventing daily-use scratches!

Now naturally that’s not a “shatterproof” kind of claim like we’ve seen from some synthetic sapphire screens, but it’s starting to approach that range of reliability. Knowing that your phone’s screen glass is “extra strong”, is more of a peace of mind sort of thing, than an actual insurance plan against dropping your phone … but we all know drops will happen — let’s just hope that if you drop your new Gorilla Glass 5 protected phone, the new technology will come to your rescue.

One more thing to rejoice about — Gorilla Glass won’t be really expensive: glass typically makes up less than 1% of the cost of a typical smartphone, according to Bayne.

Apart from Samsung, more than 40 smartphone makers use Gorilla Glass, including LG and HTC.
Corning has an on-again, off-again relationship with Apple; Gorilla Glass can be found in the iPhone 6 and some earlier models, but it may not have found its way onto the iPhone 6s.

In addition to the latest Gorilla Glass, the company is also working on a project it calls “Corning Fire,” a blend of glass and sapphire.

Corning competitor GT Technologies had been working on a sapphire screen intended for iPhones until it declared bankruptcy in 2014. Bayne shared that there are still plans to market Fire glass for the wearables market, though he didn’t offer more details.

While Apple’s plans for next year’s iPhone and iPad screens are not yet known, Gorilla Glass 4 seems a strong contender for that particular brand. Other sapphire suppliers are able to meet volume requirements for lens covers and Touch ID buttons, but there is currently insufficient worldwide production capacity to make iPhone and iPad screens.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.