Corning has introduced its latest innovation in smartphone glass technology with Gorilla Glass 6, designed to make do even after 15 waist-level drops making smartphones twice as secure as its preceding technology. The “extra level of armour” that Corning has included will not only allow a device to withstand drops from higher heights but also multiple drops from the same height with no major damage.
The company says it managed to achieve this due to the higher rate of compression which is significantly larger than last year’s Gorilla Glass 5. The durability of the glass is thus not only stress on the surface but also deep within the glass material. Corning says in its own testing of the Gorilla Glass 6, 77 percent of the samples were left unharmed after surviving 20 drops from 1-meter height.
Even with improved durability, the glass used for these tests were sized between 0.6mm and 0.8mm which is the common thickness for a glass over a smartphone’s display. The latest Gorilla Glass technology also enhances wireless charging capabilities, support larger displays with smaller bezels and will allow OEMs to customise the surface on a glass-back phone.
There’s just one thing the Gorilla Glass 6 hasn’t improved and that’s the resistance to scratches. The material still has the same durability against scratches as the Gorilla Glass 5, which you’d have come to use on the LG V30 or the Galaxy S9.
Corning says its Gorilla Glass technology is being used by 45 brands worldwide and is already present in over 6 billion devices. The Gorilla Glass 6 is currently available to OEMs for testing purposes and is estimated to come installed on smartphones later this year.
VP, Technology and Product development, Corning Gorilla Glass, Jaymin Amin said “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. This enables Gorilla Glass 6 to be more resistant to damage. Moreover, with breaks during drops being a probabilistic event, the added compression helps increase, on average, the likelihood of survival through multiple drop events”.