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Gorilla Glass 6 can help your phone's display survive up to 15 drops from as high as 3 feet

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By Alan Friedman

Updated: Jul 19, 2018, 1:12 AM

So you say you have, oops, butterfingers. You've dropped your phone more times than you can remember, and the salesman at your wireless provider's local store invites you to Thanksgiving every year. But there is some good news today. Thanks to Corning's improved Gorilla Glass 6, you might actually be hosting Thanksgiving this year. According to Corning, phones with the new cover glass survived 15 drops of 1 meter (3.28 feet) onto rough surfaces. Corning says that the protection afforded by Gorilla Glass 6 is twice as much as the protection offered by its predecessor.

The statistics that Corning passed along are pretty interesting; citing a consumer study from media company Toluna, the average smartphone owner drops his or her phone seven times a year, and half of those times the drop measured 1 meter or less. That means that Gorilla Glass 6 can be a difference maker. Corning also tried the same test on competitive mixtures made from soda lime and aluminosilicate, but those mixtures failed to offer protection after just one drop.

Gorilla Glass 6 is being tested by several manufacturers as we type this, and Corning says that it will launch the cover glass in a few months.

"As consumers become more dependent on their smartphones, the opportunity for potentially damaging drops is also on the rise. Now more than ever, it’s critical that the cover glass provides outstanding protection. Corning Gorilla Glass 6 improves upon Gorilla Glass 5 by surviving drops from higher heights, but, more importantly, has been engineered to survive multiple drops."-John Bayne, vice president and general manager, Corning Gorilla Glass

"Gorilla Glass 6 is an entirely new glass composition that can be chemically strengthened to give it significantly higher levels of compression than is possible with Gorilla Glass 5. This enables Gorilla Glass 6 to be more resistant to damage. Moreover, with breaks during drops being a probabilistic event, the added compression helps increase, on average, the likelihood of survival through multiple drop events."-Dr. Jaymin Amin, vice president of technology and product development, Corning Gorilla Glass and Corning Specialty Materials

Corning has also designed Gorilla Glass 6 for the more modern phone designs that use glass for 85% of a handset's "enclosure." That includes both the front and back of the device.

source: Corning

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Alan, an ardent smartphone enthusiast and a veteran writer at PhoneArena since 2009, has witnessed and chronicled the transformative years of mobile technology. Owning iconic phones from the original iPhone to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, he has seen smartphones evolve into a global phenomenon. Beyond smartphones, Alan has covered the emergence of tablets, smartwatches, and smart speakers.

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