Gorilla Glass Makes Dropping Your Phone...Not Such A Big Deal

Mobile computing equipment are common place. They're the new necessity for being connected. It's as standard as having a television or calculator. Wait! Almost all phones have calculators. Part of this new common place for these devices will include a few mishaps. When I dropped my smartphone, before it hit the floor I was already imagining how much it would cost to replace. Nonetheless, to my surprise the smartphone’s glass screen hadn't been smashed. I knew there must be something special about the material in the screen cover. As it turns out, it's made from a material referred to as Gorilla Glass developed by Corning.

Today’s cell phones, tablets and laptops take a beating. While being shuffled around through our daily lives we require the screens to be crystal clear, resists scratches and not shatter from drops, bumps and mishaps. It should likewise be thin and light-weight. Corning’s Gorilla Glass achieves this.

Gorilla Glass is made from an alkali-aluminosilicate. It's about thirty times harder than plasti, about as hard as sapphire crystals and not as hard as diamond, but close. In addition it has a the cabability to resist fracturing from an existing crack or chip.

Gorilla glass can be made to be as thin as 0.5 mm. This makes it an excellent cover for touch screens. Because the material can be built to be thin it can transfer the pressure or change in electrical current, based on the technology used by the smartphone designer.

On January 9, 2012 Corning revealed Gorilla Glass 2. This next generation glass can be produced 20% thinner and retain the same robustness as its predecessor. Corning has made available on their website a couple of videos demonstrating the strength and durability of Gorilla Glass. In the first video a 4.0 Lbs ball is dropped from a height of approximately 3 feet onto a 1mm thick piece of glass. In the 2nd video a baseball is launched at 50 MPH at an 0.8mm sheet of Gorilla Glass. Of course in both cases the sheet of glass doesn't break. Amazing!

A number of the Windows and Android Tablets are currently using Gorilla Glass. These include but are not limited to: Acer Iconia Tab, Iconia Smart, Asus Transformer Pad Infinity; Motorola Xoom, Xoom2 and XYBOARD and Samsung Galaxy Note.

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