This video screencap comes after a Gorilla Glass 4 device fell for a full meter and landed directly onto a sandpaper-coated surface. Look: no breakage, no shattering. Corning On Thursday, Corning Incorporated, the creators of Gorilla Glass, unveiled the fourth generation of its thin, durable glass technology for use in smartphones, tablets, and other mobile electronics. Gorilla Glass 4 is already being advertised as “up to two times stronger” than any “competitive” mobile screen, with a specific focus on surviving everyday drops in the real world. Corning confirmed to Ars Technica that the upgraded glass will reach consumer devices “this quarter.” Global marketing director David Velasquez was unwilling to reveal “what we did to the glass to make it better,” but he talked at length about one major change to the company’s lab testing: a single sheet of sandpaper. After analyzing “thousands upon thousands” of screens broken in the real world, Corning confirmed that a major contributor to common breakage was dropping a phone on “rough surfaces like asphalt and concrete.” That might seem like a head-smackingly obvious issue, but Velasquez insists that the smartphone glass-making industry, which hasn’t even existed for a full decade, has “no standard” for such testing. Most drop tests employ surfaces like stainless steel or granite, which replicate surfaces in a home. “The best way to approximate what asphalt does [to a phone screen] is 180-grit sandpaper,” Velasquez said. That can more consistently reproduce the microscopic breakage of a rough surface than even a giant sheet of asphalt (which, Corning learned after a few tests, actually smooths out at a point of contact after a few drops). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gorilla Glass 4 promises to save your phone from street drops