It's been about two years since version four of Corning's ubiquitous protective glass rolled out, andGorilla Glassnow protects some 4.5 billion devices across the planet. So, you can probably thank Corning if your phone has ever survived a tumble onto the sidewalk. This fall, Corning will start protecting new devices with its toughest version of Gorilla Glass yet. According tothe company's own lab tests, a Gorilla Glass 5 smartphone screen will survive a 1.6-meter drop (about 5 feet, 4 inches) on its face around 80 percent of the time.
"We recently did a survey, and it's fairly obvious that everyone drops their phone. We find that the average height is over a meter high," Corning's Senior VP Jim Steinerexplained toTechCrunch. "Based on our internal data on drop events, our data shows that Gorilla Glass 5 outperforms 4 by 1.8-times."
On the other hand, the latest version is about on-par with version four in terms of scratch resistance. (Which the company tests by putting the phone in a purse, and then tossing the purse in a tumbler barrel.) The new glass is already commercially available and the company expects it to start showing up on retail devices later this quarter.
