As Corning unveils its latest Gorilla Glass, we ask: What happened to sapphire mobe screens? Four years ago at the height of smartwatch hype, it was the most desirable mineral in the world. The tech superpowers jostled to obtain supplies of the material, just as the superpowers jostled to secure their nitrate supplies* ahead of the First World War. Sapphire would become the main ingredient in smartphone displays – as …
it's unmarked despite being my daily wear watch for more than a few years.
Well yes, but I've had cheap watches with plastic screens which didn't get a scratch after years of use, (and I wear my watch with the screen facing out on my wrist).
It comes down to luck a lot of the time. (or perhaps just sods-law, that my £10 watches have been fine, while it's only the expensive ones that ever seem to get scratched/dented)
The actual Omegas that went to the moon had acrylic crystals, though Omega's replicas have sapphire. It was feared that an accidental smash or possibly thermal shock might result in thousands of sharp sapphire shards floating around the confined space of the spacecraft. That's far more inconvenient than a slightly scratched watch.
Percentages.
Tungesten Carbide is 50/50 Tungsten and Carbon. It's usually cemented with cobalt, though, which makes it more properly termed a cermet, or metallic ceramic.
The most carbon in carbon steel is 2% (ultra-high carbon steel), though cast iron has greater percentages of carbon still. Once you get up that high, the material become more and more brittle, like a ceramic. You just can't get 50/50 pure iron and carbon to hold together. But if you use iron OXIDE, then you can... and you get ferrite - a ceramic.
The size of a carbon atom relative to the spacing of the crystalline form of the metal determines how much carbon or silicon can be held as an alloy. If you add different atoms in then you get different physical properties; there's a whole range of ferroalloys.
Twenty plus years of carrying a phone around and never dropped one once. Couldn't people just stop dropping phones, rather than relying on phones not breaking when dropped?
Sort of like TVs: I don't piss down the back of mine, so why should technology protect this particular incident?
Or take out insurance - in this case, a "tax" on the careless.
Dropping phones is rarely the issue it's the insistence on not keeping the phone in a decent case is where the idiocy lies.
The manufacturers are partly to blame by creating products that look fantastic: all glass and shiny and sleek lines and stuff! And who doesn't want to display their awesome naked beauty :)
Thing is, even a 5 eurodollarpound case obviates a trip to the repair shop if people weren't so vain and lazy.
The problem is that a lot of the cases are inconvenient. And either make the phone hard to access in a hurry (say when they're ringing) - or are uncomfortable to hold.
Really the manucturers should design the phones to be protected - given that they've got these honking great vulnerable screens in the middle of them. Or if not, sell them with a reasonably priced and well designed case.
IaS observed, "...cases are inconvenient... ...hurry....ringing..."
Some combinations of phones and cases use wee magnets to (optionally) trigger the 'Answer Call' function when the case cover is lifted opened. Can be very convenient.
Some also have nifty cut-outs in the case's cover, making visible a subsection of the screen to show the Caller ID information, so you'll know in advance of opening the cover.
It's almost as if they have brilliant product designers on staff.
My previous phone had a 'case' consisting a replacement back with a flip cover to protect the screen. It was perfect, as slim and light as it could get while sturdy enough to protect the screen.
My new phone, it's impossible to replace the back as a consumer, so the phone has to get a sleeve with a hard backing and a flip cover. It completely destroyed any advantage the phone had in being thinner and is in fact almost 50% as fat as my previous phone, even though the new phone is about half as thick.
I tend to agree, mine lives in a case and then in a shirt pocket. I answer via a button on the headphone since it is to darned hard to find any other way to answer the darned thing. Since I am likely doing something like driving, (so no phone handling), dog walking, grocery juggling or another two handed task, adding a phone to the mix is for the birds. I have dropped in once and tested the strength of the walls via its projectile properties two or three times, but it is still OK: cases are wonderful.
"it's the insistence on not keeping the phone in a decent case is where the idiocy lies"
Not wanting to use a case isn't idiocy. Cases have downsides that not everyone is willing to put up with. Personally, I haven't used a case in a decade, and it's never been an issue. But I treat my phone like what it is: a sensitive electronic device.
The last phone I shattered was *because* of the case. I had a Sony Xperia Z4 Compact in a flip case. One day I pulled the case out of my pocket without having a good enough grip on the back part, and it flips open on the hinge, with the crack-the-whip effect *slinging* the phone out of the case and onto the pavement. Since it was a plastic phone without much of a bezel, the impact was transferred directly to the edge of the glass.
My current phone is a ZTE Axon Mini with an aluminum body and fairly fat top and bottom bezels, and it's got dinged corners from being dropped a few times, but it hasn't broken yet. Why have I dropped it? Well, the display goes right up to the sides, and the case edges are rounded to give the impression of thinness, so there's really only about a 1/8" wide area on each edge that I can hold it by without triggering the touchscreen.
In my 22 years of driving, I've never crashed a car or hit a pedestrian, so I don't see why car manufacturers spend billions and billions every year on R&D for safety. Can't people just stop crashing, rather than relying on airbags, seatbelts, crumple zones, etc? Imagine the cool cars we could have if they didn't need to be safe!
Natural selection; a "tax" on the careless.
I have dropped a mobile*, once, it landed corner first onto a concrete step. As it was a nice solid HTC P6500 the only damage was a bit of a dent in the case, the internals and screen survived and carried on working.
The number of phones I have damaged by users at work, probably around 10% per year that I know about (I suspect some get 3rd party screens fitted without them telling me), suggests it's not that uncommon a problem though so anything that reduces the damage is a "good thing".
*Juggling phone, car keys, laptop and various bits of kit as I exited through a fire door.
Phone manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure that their phone are sleek, slim and sexy. That is all great, but they are also so delicate that the first thing most users do is pack them in a case totally hiding over 50% of the phone, and bulking it up.
Why can't phones be made a bit bigger and tougher...with maybe room for a bigger battery while they are at it? There are still some "rugged" version out there, but they tend to go to the extreme. A nice consumer middle ground would be nice.
Why can't phones be made a bit bigger and tougher...with maybe room for a bigger battery while they are at it?
Another option is LG X Venture. I think Samsung also makes an adventure phone.
https://www.lg.com/us/cell-phones/lg-US701-unlocked-x-venture
Now if you also want flagship features with that, I doubt you'll find it. Flagships are already up to $1000. Adding these toughness features on top would bump that price to probably $1400, and the phone would have no buyers.
Super +1 I really miss the nearly indestructible Nokia's of yesteryear I had 1 which survived both the washing machine and bearing dropped over 30 feet out a window when I was doing a cable install!
Yes, I am a forgetful klutz but I fail to see why only fashionistas are catered for by phone designers these days.
Physics demands that to reduce the force on a phone compressible material should surround it, we all agree in that. What is the advantage of incorporating this material into the phone itself, as opposed to allowing a user to fit a case of their own choosing?
I can't cheat physics, I know my screen can either be really hard or really tough. I therefore fit an aftermarket hard glass screen protector. It itself has cracked through point impact - though barely visibly - but the expensive phone screen is unscathed.
"What is the advantage of incorporating this material into the phone itself, as opposed to allowing a user to fit a case of their own choosing?"
Building the phone like that is better than using a case because if it's part of the phone's design, then you can avoid the various issues that cases introduce that make it a bit more annoying to actually use the phone. For instance, cases make buttons and jacks more recessed than they would otherwise be.
Cases also avoid some of the issues that making them built in would cause like plastic/rubber stuff getting worn out looking, and gross from oils from your hands etc. over months/years. Just take a look at some people's phone cases, and tell me that's what you want your phone to look like after a year or two.
No thanks. People who want a more durable phone without the horror of having buttons and ports slightly recessed can buy the ones built for that purpose. Oh, you don't like the lack of selection? Well I'm sure people who put all those cases with different patterns and looks don't want the lack of selection that would result from having built in cases in a handful of colors, either. Why should they compromise to give you the wide selection you feel you're entitled to?
The market has spoken, and people don't want phones with built in cases.
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Recess the screen. All this "fragile screen on top" nonsense has to stop. Even the Gameboy recessed the actual vulnerable screen and then put a clear-glass fake screen over the top. You look at every big-name portable device of long-ago... the Psions and so on. The screens are all recessed and bevelled. There's a reason for that... it makes more sense than this nonsense.
I would gladly pay more for a screen that's literally a flat-square piece of glass (thus cheap and easy to replace) recessed inside a plastic shell with rounded corners. As it is, I end up buying plastic cases that replicate just that scenario with the ridiculous "edge-to-edge" screens where the slighest impact destroys the screen and the surround can literally never be allowed to warp (I have 270+ iPads in front of me... all of the ones that are damaged, the aluminium casing has been whacked in shattering the glass and making it nigh-on impossible to repair... a simple rubber edge between would have saved them all except the ones that people literally trod on).
a simple rubber edge between would have saved them all except the ones that people literally trod on).
But Apple are brilliant industrial designers. They, along with other gizmo makers have created sleek, shiny, slippery and fragile. Thus boosting sales by flogging replacement units, or spawning a cottage industry of companies offering screen replacements. Dinosaurs like Nokia just made pretty bomb-proof phones like my trusty 8850 and 8910. Those even came with 2 batteries and a charger, and I prefer those to fondleslabs. They're too large and too dense, so have an unfortunate tendency of sliding out of a jacket pocket. Then again, I'm a bit of a luddite and prefer having a phone that does phone stuff well, like make & recieve calls.
As for sapphire.. I read that there were patents involved in growing the sapphire billets large enough to then get sliced into phone-sized displays. Then when Apple & Google went Gorilla, the market evaporated and the producer went bust.
I would gladly pay more for a screen that's literally a flat-square piece of glass (thus cheap and easy to replace) recessed inside a plastic shell with rounded corners. As it is, I end up buying plastic cases that replicate just that scenario
So you would "gladly pay more" to get that, but you are already paying more and getting EXACTLY THAT with a case. What do you gain by having it built in, other than by pissing off all the people who don't want a case, or who don't want to be restricted to the handful of choices the OEM would give them versus the literally thousands of options aftermarket cases give them? Not to mention the ability to change the case when it gets worn/dirty, the plastic protecting the screen gets scratched, etc.
If there was enough demand for what you want, there would be products that give it to you. Oh wait, there ARE such products, but I'm guessing you don't like those options so you want OEMs to change what they offer (despite the market having spoken and saying otherwise) to let you choose any phone you want?
GT was greedy - they promised Apple they could make the silicon ingots in quantity, despite only having ever sold the furnaces and having no production experience except in very small scale for internal testing/validation purposes.
If they had told Apple "we can supply you the furnaces, but you will need to hire the expertise to mass produce on the scale you want" then they would have been fine if they delivered the furnaces even if Apple or whoever they hired to manufacture the ingots and cut the screens wasn't able to hold up their end.
But had they done that Apple might have said "no thanks" and their execs wouldn't have been able to cash in big time when their stock price went through the roof. They probably knew they couldn't do it, but didn't care because they knew they'd make millions before it blew up in their face.
GT was greedy - they promised Apple they could make the silicon ingots
**alumina ingots ;)
GTAT's failure is interesting from both technical and legal standpoints. Frankly, it should be a case study for industrial engineers on how not to scale-up your process rapidly.
For me, GTAT's failure turned one of my suppliers into a nearly vertically-integrated monopoly of sapphire windows when they snapped up GTAT's liquidated remains, both personnel and hardware. It's been a scramble to find second sources for big sapphire panels (we use panes the size and thickness of iPads) and window assembly.
"Corning claims it should be able to withstand 15 drops from one metre onto a hard surface"
The first thought that went through my mind was that if it'll withstand 15 drops, it'll probably withstand 1500 drops from the same height.
The second was that the bastards will build in a drop counter and a software controlled screen buster. Sadly, were it not for the complexity of a screen busting device, this is not entirely implausible on our modern world.
I was averaging 8 months between phones due to my jobs, and an inherited hand tremor. My last two devices were wrapped in an Otterbox Defender and remained intact after two years.
I can also testify that the otterbox defenders are an excellent protective case for the large part. I've had one on my iFruit 5s and 6s since getting them, and the phones are in near mint condition despite having been dropped onto tile floors, banged around, and somewhat roughly handled. I'm actually on my second case for the 5s after breaking the main latch on the previous case.
I will also state that the particular Samsung Galaxy 5S I had was special- it survived getting flung into walls twice when the Thing that was my boss at the time pissed me off. (both times the unit flexed enough that the back and battery popped out, but the phone itself survived with a couple scuff marks on the side of the case. The screen remained intact much to my surprise.)
We keep hearing about various types of transparent metal that will be used in everything from screens to buildings.
The recent references to any kind of transparent metal are to "transparent aluminum" when someone does something interesting with either aluminum oxide (alumina, sapphire) or aluminum oxynitride (AlON) and then a science-deficient media gets hold of the story.
Transparent metals of any significant thickness are a non-starter because photons interact with the electrons of the conductive material. You need band gaps - like those found in insulators - to pass any photons. Your possible transparencies are thus polymers, ceramics, and other non-conductive materials.
If you want transparency with a lot of ductility and impact resistance, your options narrow to polymers.
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