Saturday, December 8, 2012

Gorilla Glass and Android Tablets

By Justin Bernard Jr.


Mobile computing devices are the norm. They are the new requirement for being connected. It's as standard as having a TV or calculator. Hold on! Almost all phones now have calculators. An element of this new common place for these devices include a few accidents. When I dropped my mobile phone, before it hit the ground I was already considering how much it would cost to replace. Nonetheless, to my surprise the smartphone's glass display had not been broken or cracked. I suspected there had to be something unique about the material in the screen cover. As it so happens, it is constructed from a material called Gorilla Glass produced by Corning.

Today's cell phones, tablets and laptops take a beating. While being shuffled around during the course of our daily lives we demand the screens to be crystal clear, resists scratches and not shatter from drops, bumps and mishaps. It must also be thin and light. Corning's Gorilla Glass accomplishes this.

Gorilla Glass is manufactured out of 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 ability to resist fracturing from an existing crack or chip.

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

On January 9, 2012 Corning announced Gorilla Glass 2. This next generation glass can be made 20% thinner and keep the same robustness as its predecessor. Corning has made available on their website 2 videos demonstrating the strength and ruggedness of Gorilla Glass. In the 1st video a 4.0 Lbs ball is dropped from a height of about 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. Naturally in both cases the sheet of glass doesn't break. Amazing!

Some of the Android and Windows tablets are presently 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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