Corning Gorilla Glass 4 announced promising two times the durability of Gorilla Glass 3

Corning, the company behind Gorilla Glass has just unveiled its latest offering — Gorilla Glass 4. Among several other features, the Gorilla Glass 4 is touted to be twice as tough as its competitive glass when dropped on rough surfaces.

Our smartphones have become larger — sporting incredibly higher resolutions, while packing the desktop-class processors, humongous batteries, and an awe-inspiring design and build quality. But one thing that still needs a lot of improvements is the glass protection on the display. Drop your device on the floor and be assured to see the phone’s display shattered.

So when Corning, whose Gorilla Glasses are now widely used by most smartphone manufacturers including Apple, Samsung, LG, and Sony, has something to announce, the whole world turns its attention to the screen protection maker. Because this will determine the durability of our future smartphones. The company launched its first generation Gorilla Glass in 2007. Fast forward 8 years, and the fourth generation of Glass 4 packs thin material and still promises stronger durability. The company says that it analyzed hundreds of cracked smartphones to find the fracture pattern. It found “sharp-particle contact” to be the most common cause of the shattering.

Corning says that it has tested its new display protector on not just concrete and asphalt, but 180-grit sandpaper. The company mentions that the Glass 4 uses slightly different chemical process and design and processing formulation that makes it survive 80 percent of dreaded face drops. But how does it compare to the holy grail of screen protection materials sapphire? “We study all competitive materials and we’ve studied Sapphire quite a bit,” said Cliff Hund, president of Corning East Asia. “What we find is that when you subject it to abrasion, to naked eye it’s incredibly scratch resistant, even beyond Gorilla, but beyond the naked eye, microscopic, abrasion does occur.”

Hund admits that sapphire is the most scratch resistant material out there, but as one introduces stress, Gorilla still outperforms in durability from that point on.