Unbreakable phone screens could be made with a new material
economist.com
economist.com
So I did a deep dive, long story short, when Gorilla Glass makes a stronger glass, the phone makers make the screen thinner, so we are back to square one.
Most phones have screen protectors which more than double the thickness of the screen glass - that said, screen protectors are cool in that they are disposable in the event of scratching.
But I would much prefer a Pixel phone that's thicker if that means it has better battery life and reception. The Pixel 6a THIC.
Complaining about phones getting thinner is a bit odd when iPhones haven’t gotten thinner in ~5 years.
6.8” display, 20.8mm thick, 492 grams, 13,200mAh battery.
https://m.ulefone.com/power-armor-13.html?PageName=specs
My iPhone 7 battery lasts about two hours of mixed use browsing / app use. Will get the battery replaced when the tank arrives, I’m just over Apples lack of options with regard to battery size at anything like a reasonable price.
Friend of mine was really happy with his Ulephone, great value if it works for you.
I don't remember anybody ever complaining about the size of their phone. And although I have literally never heard it, I could in theory believe a small minority of people might want a thinner phone if competitors were able to do it.
I don't buy that the phone manufacturers couldn't work together and agree to release "thicker" phones with reasonable battery though, as they do on just about every other industry feature.
I assume it's just an excuse for them to further close the abilities of right to repair where serviceable or otherwise reasonable batteries would lead to less new phone sales. Exactly the same situation as the screens, I'm sure. Just keep quiet about these things though when marketing this.
Got to keep people spending money.
The 16:9 Galaxy S6 was 5.1 inches. The S22 has a 6.2 inch diagonal screen, despite being wider by only a millimeter than the S6.
While mid-rangers have been getting larger, only the actual display has grown larger on the flagships, and not the chassis.
Id prefer a slightly thicker phone with a slightly smaller screen, the better to actually fit in my pants pocket.
And on weight, I find the 13 pro to be ok but the 13 pro max was too much. So what they have now is the limit of what I want the weight to be.
Give me a notched phone roughly the size of a SE, ~2x as thick with a slide keyboard and i will go back to android... basicly bring back the moto droid line!!
> I never use the phone on the table anyway so it's no issue.
Just like when Apple never seemed to test how left handed people use phones, no issue to you isn't really the point.
It's the best phone I've ever had.
With a 512GB SD card, and a built-in fat battery, I never have to worry about running out either of storage or power. It's liberating.
And the camera is good enough that the storage does fill up.
The casing should simply be built in so the cool coloring, texture or material the phone offers can actually be seen
My wild theory was the key was an aluminum (alloy) and it corroded creating corundum since there was no way a key could scratch the screen. I was just trying to console myself that I wasn't stupid and careless there were bigger forces at play.
I picked it up dreading a shattered display but there wasn't a scratch on it. The steel bezel was damaged though.
Gorilla glass 1 with the thickness they used was indeed awesome.
While there are more sophisticated models in this space, for something of a budget oriented phone (which i'll probably use until the battery degrades, seeing as unfortunately it doesn't have a removable one), it's both usable and feels rugged enough.
No longer do i have to worry much about things like dust/sand or even splashes of water and such. It actually fell once from about 1.5 meters out of my pocket and on stone bricks, while i was doing pull ups. I'm sure that the situation would have been worse if it had landed screen down, but even after landing on its corner, there was no visible damage afterwards.
Plus, after using it for a while, i've found that the larger form factor doesn't bother me in the slightest, so i'm not exactly sure why modern phones are so obsessed with being thing. Then again, i also enjoy the form factor of ThinkPads, while there are people out there who call them ugly and too bulky.
This year alone, I have had 3 phones slip or drop 2-3 ft(< 1m), from my pocket or hand, onto carpet and sand, and all came up with cracked glass, one with a screen that no longer lit up.
Elegant fragility is the engineered intention, IMO For truth in advertising, they should rebrand it "Fragile Flower Glass"©.
From the outside, it looked like it should be pretty tough, yet when it fell off of a table and on the floor (not even hardwood, i think it was linoleum), it just straight up died.
I bet that the thicker plastic frames of those old phones still absorb impacts better than most of the modern thin ones, yet a proper rubberized frame/case will almost always be even better.
Plus, IP68 (which was described in IEC 60529 in 2001, a few years after that first phone came out) now being available in consumer hardware at an affordable price point is pretty nice!
So it's mostly a matter of supporting the manufacturers who create the devices that you actually want. Maybe shopping around for a phone with a removable battery AND the aforementioned ruggedness would be a good move on my part.
Making glass thinner would actually make it less likely to break as it allows a little more flex to the glass. Making it thinner might compromise some other property of the glass so I’m not sure why they don’t use super thin glass.
a lot goes into building and refining the production process but once it starts, oh baby pandora’s box is open.
However, in this case I have a little bit too much knowledge about the field and I have to say that it's "not even wrong"... it reads like gibberish. Yes perovskites can be used to generate nano-particles which generate light on amorphous glass substrates. But the need to use lead based materials, or glass substrates, the difficulty of manufacture or the low efficiency, and so on are not advantages. They are disadvantages.
In summary this discovery takes us no closer to unbreakable phone screens for a multitude of reasons, but primarily because what breaks (cracks, shatters, scratches, yields) is the cover glass rather than for example the OLED display, which are now primarily made from/on flexible substrates anyway. It is solving some orthogonal set of problems that are not laid out in the article, and which I as an expert am unable determine after reading it without searching for the original source material.
Good to know I guess. I should clarify that the information I get actually doesn't have anything to do with the particular topic. It could be gibberish as you say and it would still give me a sense that someone's out there trying to iterate and experimenting with new tech. That in itself is nice to know. As with OLEDs, in a lot of cases it's not gibberish. But I assume some percentage of stories like this are gibberish. It still makes me happy that people are trying push things forward and that someone cared enough to write a story about it.
This editorial seems very Apple centric, not generic science centric.
Gorilla Glass 1 released in 2006, iPhone 1 released summer of 2007.
Gorilla Glass is basically a rebrand of an old tech , 'Chemcor Glass', that was brought back off the shelf due to an apparently new need (mobile tech).
It was used initially in the 60s for windscreens in high end open cockpit race cars as well as prototype style LeMans cars.
It was scrapped for use in street cars because crash testing showed that the increased toughness of the glass actually increased passenger head trauma.
I really loathe the latest "Your wifi security is insecure!!!" when not using WPA 3, despite the fact the iPhone is the only device most people have today that is WPA 3 capable.
Edit: Went back and found a review of that phone, and I guess reviewers hated it. The screen wasn't as bright because the AMOLED screen wasn't bonded directly to a glass front. Oh well. My wife liked it just fine.
I have a 13 Pro Max coming Monday, and guess what, sitting on my desk in front of me is the case it will go into immediately after I take it out of the package. Kinda sad. Someone said they're not as slippery as the older phones, but have sharp edges. Okay on something the size of a 4S, not so okay on something the size of a small tablet.
I hope you can get a few more years out of your phone too!
Have the 12 Mini now which is the next smallest phone, but feel much less secure with it because I can't reach both the top and bottom of the screen at once with my thumb while holding it securely in one hand. Have to always be sliding up and down to reach what needs to be hit, which makes it much more likely to be dropped. Would kill for a proper small phone again.
Apple tried to use sapphire glass for phone screens around 2014, but only succeeded in driving their sapphire maker into bankruptcy.
I suppose that it is more difficult to handle in production, especially when you're aiming at a large surface area. But if scanners have it, this issue does not seem to be insurmountable.
Many customers would probably pay extra if they would get a phone that's as tough as a wrist watch but does not require a case.
Which is why I have a phone sold by Caterpillar, Inc.[1]
Maybe you mean on the back, where sometimes they use cheaper glass?
Aluminium oxide, for example - it comes off as white powder on motorcycle engines - and is pretty hard stuff, the same stuff as sapphire and ruby. That can end up on surfaces via motorcycle gloves if you ride motorbikes, if not from your own bike, then grit thrown up by tyres on a wet day.
I mean, phones don't scratch easily, but they do acquire a tiny scratch or two every few months, and a bad scratch maybe once or twice a year.
It's not awful - but scratches are there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrowetting#:~:text=Elect....
https://www.flexenable.com/technology/flexible-olcd/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266081727_Electrowe...
Edit: Did I say something wrong? I legitimately don't know what the article is claiming, and is there something I'm overlooking?
They want customers to keep paying to repair those screens and backs and keep buying new phones more often.
"Would be recyclable" and "will be recycled" are totally different things.
I think this is a cool article, but I wish it wouldn't try to sweep the environmental and toxicity issues under the rug with statements like "would be recyclable".
Whenever a company exploits a process to squeeze out extra profit we all assume the newly externalized costs. All products should be recycled at the end of their life and the costs involved should be built into the price. Some states mandate a redeemable deposit for cans and bottles. Perhaps every the United States could craft a responsible recycling program that tacks an appropriate tax onto a product that reflects the cost of a recycling the worst 10% off products in a category. I gladly pay to safely dispose my household waste responsibly, why must I continue to pay for companies that cleverly escape bearing these costs? The harms have been exhaustively calculated and established. I’m sick of being terrorized by belligerent psychopaths that feel entitled to pollute and contaminate everything they set their insatiable eyes upon.