Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch:
It takes about two years for Corning to develop each new generation of Gorilla Glass, the resilient material that graces a critical mass of smartphones. That process has for several update cycles focused on protecting screens against drops, fending off shatters and cracks by boosting what's known as compressive strength. The newly announced Gorilla Glass Victus, though, gives equal weight to preventing scratches. That's harder than it sounds and more useful than you'd think.
[...] There's also the fact that making glass that's both scratch and drop resistant is, well, hard. The manufacture of glass is often a game of compromise, which you can see most clearly in the quest for durable foldable phones: the stronger it is, the less it can bend. In this case, getting those two properties to play nice is less a direct contradiction than it is a process of reinvention.
Phone screens had previously been designed to resist drops, but with consumers upgrading their phones less frequently scratch-resistance has grown in importance.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Sunday July 26 2020, @10:35PM
Buddy of mine works in a machine shop, crawls on top of roofs, big rigs, etc... He seems to break his screen about every 6-8 months. Last one he dropped from waist high and it landed face down on top of a nail sticking out of the floor he was tearing up. Nail tip hit dead center and broke the glass. The screen was fine and the phone is functional, but he's constantly dropping his phones. Prior to that it was one he took out of the protective case because the charger in my car had a USB cable that didn't fit right. Soon as he took it out of the case and started to get out of the car, his dog knocked it out of his hand and it hit the concrete right on the corner. Phone had only been out of the case for five minutes and boom, cracked screen.
I keep telling him if he's going to break them that often he should just buy the cheap ones, but he never listens. He probably spends about $300-400 a year on replacement phones and screens.