Corning’s new ceramic glass might save your next phone from disaster

This is not Corning’s first swing at adding ceramic to the mix—the company is also responsible for Apple’s Ceramic Shield glass, which has been used on the company’s high-end phones since 2021. Apple fans have been largely impressed with the strength of Ceramic Shield, too. With the debut of Gorilla Glass Ceramic, we’ll be seeing Android phones with ceramic protection. However, we expect this to be a material for more expensive devices.

The glass sandwich

It may seem odd that the industry spends so much time developing stronger glass instead of moving to other, less fragile materials in phones, but there are reasons to use it. Glass is less prone to scratching compared to plastic, so it’s natural to expect it on the screen side. Using glass for the back of a phone enables wireless charging and magnetic attachment, which people have come to expect in premium phones. Using glass can improve wireless signal strength compared to fully metal bodies, too.

Putting glass inside an aluminum frame makes phones extremely hard to bend.

Credit:
Ryan Whitwam

Glass also has some mechanical advantages you might not realize. Remember bendgate, when Apple’s sleek aluminum phones would acquire banana-like bends simply from riding around in your front pocket? That doesn’t happen anymore because most high-end (i.e., not plastic) phones have adopted the glass sandwich design. Glass has low tensile strength, which is why it cracks when struck, but its compressive strength is off the chart. So placing a pane of strengthened glass inside a metal frame makes the device extremely stiff and resistant to bending. There are trade-offs, but everyone adopted the glass sandwich for a reason.

We’re interested to see if Gorilla Glass Ceramic makes handling a phone less precarious. Corning announces new versions of Gorilla Glass regularly, but you won’t always see its latest materials across the board. In this case, Corning says Motorola will be the first to offer it “in the coming months.” Presumably, that means it will be used on the exterior of the next foldable Razr.