THIS IS THE LAST GLASS PROTECTOR YOU WILL EVER NEED
Corning's latest Gorilla Glass protector covers the display of phones from Apple, Samsung, LG and many more, and two years later, Corning has just unveiled Gorilla Glass 6.
Claiming to be more durable than ever, the new glass protector is able to survive up to 15 successive drops from a meter high. However, it would not be recommended putting it to the test though, that number of successive survived drops is an average, so your mileage may vary.
It should come as some relief if you've got a tendency to let your smartphone slip from your hand. As yet it is not confirmed which phones are going to make use of the new glass.
"Gorilla Glass 6 is an entirely new glass composition that can be chemically strengthened to give it significantly higher levels of compression than is possible with Gorilla Glass 5," says Corning's vice president of technology and product development, Dr Jaymin Amin. "Moreover, with breaks during drops being a probabilistic event, the added compression helps increase, on average, the likelihood of survival through multiple drop events."
That chemical strengthening involves a process of ion exchange, where large ions get packed tightly into the glass surface at extreme temperatures, that is how the compression happens when the glass cools back down.
Gorilla Glass 6 is more than twice as durable than Gorilla Glass 5 at surviving multiple drops, claims Corning, and we need that kind of toughness on our phones. A consumer survey conducted for Corning suggest we drop our phones an average of seven times a year, with half of those drops being more than a meter high.
At the same time, Corning has confirmed that scratch resistance is at the same level as it was on Gorilla Glass 5, so there is no improvement in that department.
The new material arrives at an appropriate time, not only are border bezels disappearing from the front of phone designs, but many manufacturers are also adopting a glass backing their phones. If an all-glass device takes a tumble, it could end up cracked on the front and back.