Daniel Hruska The name Corning may not be familiar to everyone. However, we touch its Gorilla Glass product, which is used to protect iPhone displays, with our fingers every day. According to Corning executive James Clappin, the company is planning to introduce a new glass with a resistance greater than the current Gorilla Glass 4 and with a hardness close to sapphire.
The whole thing was announced at a meeting of investors at the beginning of this February and is called Project Phire. According to Clappin, the new material should reach the market later this year: "We already said last year that sapphire is great in terms of scratch resistance, but it doesn't do so well in drops. So we created a new product that has better properties than Gorilla Glass 4, all with almost sapphire-like scratch resistance.”
Corning, with its Gorilla Glass, was under quite a bit of pressure last year. Rumors about the use of synthetic sapphire glasses in iPhones, allegedly supplied to Apple by GT Advanced, could be responsible for this. But last year unexpectedly filed for bankruptcy, and so it was obvious that the new iPhones would not get sapphire.
Corning's position in the market hasn't changed, but Gorilla Glass has been under more scrutiny than ever. There were comparison videos in which the sapphire didn't get a single scratch, whereas the Corning product was blessed with them. It doesn't matter at all that Gorilla Glass performed better in the drop simulation, the company's entire reputation was at stake. So there is nothing better than taking Gorilla Glass and adding sapphire properties to it.
Such glass will fit perfectly with smartphones and tablets, but also with the growing smart watch market. Already today, Corning supplies its glasses to the Motorola 360 watch. As for the upcoming Apple Watch, the Watch and Watch Edition will receive sapphire, while the Watch Sport will receive ion-strengthened Ion-X Glass. Project Phire can bring the answer to what glass with great resistance and hardness for a wide range of devices should look like in the future.
