

  (Source: Flawless Facets)
Sapphire would be three times as hard as Gorilla Glass







Gorilla Glass
The current market leader is Corning's Gorilla Glass.



GT Advanced Tech
[Image Source: GT Advanced Tech/ExtremeTech]


Sources: MIT Review, CNN [Corning Response]

Comments     Threshold


RE: Incorrect
By jimbojimbo on 3/22/2013 12:02:28 AM , Rating: 2
I think the main problem is making it thin enough to be viable for a cell phone and not diminish the touch capabilities.
My Omega watch has a sapphire face and I've had it for over 10 years now and accidentally smacked in on several brick walls but not a scratch. Love it.

RE: Incorrect
By ShieTar on 3/22/2013 3:58:52 AM , Rating: 2
I don't think so. I have been using 0.5mm thin sheets of synthetic single crystal sapphire in my PhD thesis, more than a decade ago. I think what really happened is just that somebody found a way to make the process cheaper.

Now if just somebody could do the same for synthetic diamond. 10.000$ per cm² is probably a bit much for a smartphone screen.

RE: Incorrect
By deksman2 on 3/22/2013 5:21:54 AM , Rating: 2
I agree with this assessment.
The technology is not new.
But, I would have preferred they used synthetic diamonds (which also can be produced in abundance since decades ago, and it was in the mid 90-ies it became practical for electronic chip use and overall usage in computers).

Technologies/materials like this are decades old actually.
The core difference is that the market takes time to find monetarily cheap ways of using them (which has nothing to do with our technological ability to create something in abundance with high energy/resource/technology efficiency, from the get go).
Market based economy is holding us back severely... and to top it off, many won't even use new technologies from the get go because its more profitable to 'milk' outdated technologies and make revisions for as long as they can.

That and the artificial notion of 'cost' is coming down at much faster pace the more automated our production is (which is nearly everything), so the rate of new materials/technologies trickling down to others even in the monetary system is accelerating (but the present socio-economic system is stupid/unsustainable since it creates large amounts of waste and doesn't recycle nearly anything - we had the ability to use all the landfills for material/tool/technology creation since the late 19th century, and there would be 0 need to extract new ones from the Earth since we knew back then to create synthetic materials with superior properties using less energy and raw material overall).

RE: Incorrect
By deksman2 on 3/22/2013 5:22:39 AM , Rating: 2
I would say this is a step in the right direction.

RE: Incorrect




RE: Incorrect
Can you grow a whole phone out of it?

RE: Incorrect


