After two years of releasing Gorilla Glass 4, glassmaker Corning unveiled its next version Gorilla Glass 5. According to the company, Gorilla Glass 5 survives up to 80% of the time when dropped from 1.6 meters. This means that the glass will survive 2x improvement in damage resistance over Gorilla Glass 4, which survived drops from about a meter high.
However, reports from The Verge pointed out few hinges in the 80% survival rate of the new Glass. The tests that achieved 80% survival rate was conducted with pieces of glass that were 0.6mm thick. “Corning now makes glass as thin as 0.4mm, so smartphone OEMs that opt for thinner glass or go with more rigid smartphone designs may see different results,” report said.
Also, it said that the demos showed at Corning's Silicon Valley offices were face drops, meaning it’s not sure of the result when the smartphone falls on its corner/edge, which is how many people crack their displays.
“What will define the performance of the overall device on those types of corner drops is stiffness of the phone design, but also how the glass is packaged,” report quoted Corning's vice president and general manager John Bayne.
“Much of this is dependent on what's known as the "proudness" of the glass, which refers to how high above the phone the glass sits. If it sits up really high, we call that a proud design. If it's protected by the bezel of the design then, it's - not proud. So if you have a device that has a proud design, that one wouldn't perform as well as one that had a different design,” Bayne added.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGLSuZky3Jc
The Glass is in its production stage now and will be available on devices later this year. It is estimated that Corning Gorilla Glass has been used on more than 4.5 billion devices worldwide, on more than 1,800 products across 40 major brands.
