Gorilla Glas 2 | Hacker News Reader

Gorilla Glas 2

corning.com

27 pointsMitt14 comments

I find it amazing that something once seen as boring as a piece of glass now has so much brand recognition.

This sounds excellent for Corning. As a company that melts glass by the pound and sells it by the square foot, 20% thinner should result in net cost savings.

What I'm most excited to see in production on a phone are their matte finishes. You never realize the kind of friction coefficient you're working against on today's glossy touchscreens until you've tried one with a smooth matte finish. It's miles better.

Anybody at CES pick anything up on new product adoption? I've only seen the news regarding Acer.

Not directly related to the article, but I find it weird that all advertisements always quantify their measurements with "up to" - In this case "up to 20% thickness reduction". If it is 20% in a majority of designs/uses, say so, or give it as an average of 15% or some such. I always feel "up to" means "best case, carefully controlled laboratory tests which has no application in the real world"

Or it could mean "structurally equivalent at 20% thinner, but now you have the option to make the cover thinner and lighter and increase strength". Engineering is always a compromise; improved materials change the nature of the compromises you need to make.

As the owner of one of many shattered iPods and iPhones, I say 20% stronger is a good start. Maybe plastic is ultimately the way of the future for handheld devices.

Stronger is good, but resisting edge chips is still a problem for any of these tempered glasses.

As an owner of a shattered iPod and a pristine (but much more aggressively dropped) nexus S, the solution is really curved screens with protective plastic on the edges.

What I have really been waiting for is someone to make monitors with no bezel using Gorilla Glass so tiling would be better.

Highly recommend watching some of the videos. Some cool technology on show there...

Now if only they could make electrochromic gorilla glass that will "white" out your screen after failed password attempts. On second thought, it would probably result in worse than Android battery life.

"Gorilla Glass 2"

Anyone else confused by Microsoft slithering their way into this press release? I can imagine they find this to be a PR coup, and worked very hard to be a "part" of the announcement - perhaps even paying their way in. I find it ... "classless."

That's an awful lot of assumptions to make just to force your personal views into the conversation.

It's a press release. Getting annoyed at marketing in a press release is like being angry at water for being wet. Save your anger for the "journalists" that copy/paste the release into an article so they can make their deadline.

Microsoft have very strong relationships with hardware manufacturers. They're acutely aware of how important industrial design has been for Apple and are doing huge amounts of work to push forward the development of Ultrabooks, tablets and smartphones running Windows.

Apple's buying power is so immense that they transform whole markets. They're buying most of the world's Flash memory and creating worldwide shortages of CNC machining capacity. Apple are likely to be the single biggest purchaser of Gorilla Glass, so it is very much in Microsoft's interest to ensure that good supplies are available for other OEMs. They can negotiate on behalf of "everyone but Apple" in a way that no-one else could.

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