Corning’s new Apple-like ceramic glass might save your next phone from disaster
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I don't know if you know this but a lot of phones have and used to have plastic backs and are/were plenty stiff. Samsung briefly switched to that for the Galaxy S21 and the reason they switched back was because people complained about wanting "premium materials". Phones weren't breaking.
The ultra thin sheets of tempered glass in phones aren't exactly super rigid, and polycarbonate is rigid enough to make the sandwich solid
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Well actually plaster is a bit like concrete, in that it names a class of materials.
There's plaster of Paris, which is the gypsum-based product made into plasterboard and is the main component of most modern interior finishing systems.
There's quicklime, which was commonly used as part of older lathe and plaster and is found in some modern plaster mixes.
There's cement plaster, containing Portland cement, commonly used as a render over masonry, inside and out.
There's clay-based plasters, which were used when lime was hard to come by.
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Sure it is. As the original poster stated, walls in old houses were commonly covered in Plaster Portland Cement, aka "stucco". It's still widely used in construction, mostly for external walls.
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If only they would invent some way of leveling furniture…
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They did, but they didn't sell. I worked for Motorola when we launched the Droid Turbo 2. Its whole marketing was shatterproof.
I loved that phone and my whole job was to show how indestructible it's screen was. I would constantly drop it. Let reps drop it. Let customers drop it. Chuck it across rooms. And it was eventually, after about 200 throws across a room, that the internals of the phone finally broke. But the screen still wasn't shattered.
So then I took it up to a second story at a Verizon Training Center and dropped it off. Screen still didn't shatter. It did scratch like crazy though, so you really did need at least the plastic screen protector on top. The top plastic layer of the actual screen was also replaceable. But it was a tricky enough replacement that most home users would probably mess it up and get bubbles/fit similar to what you get installing a finicky screen protector. Still nice to have a backup if you didn't use a screen protector and scratched your screen.
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Whole conversation just feels like frodo with ADHD against the world. Nobody else understands how you can be a functional human being while being a chaos demon. Jokes on them, we usually aren't.That's not Eddie Murphy
But yeah that'd be nice as a theory but in practice I'm not that organized. I just throw shit in a pocket
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Corning HAS been a tech leader most of the 20th century. Tom Edison's lightbulb glass, and cost-cut glass for the lamp industry. Pyrex(r) revolutionized lab-ware; its cheap-versions were fun at home, we make taquitos and quiche in 'glass' (but they don't sell real Pyrex now). The 200-inch telescope mirror at Palomar. (Quartz didn't work.) Noted for "...research and "disruptive" and "on demand" product innovation." Safer car headlight and window glass, though foiled by Detroit sleaze. Some low-loss optic fibers. And The Corning Museum of Glass which is/was fairly unique for Industry. Even in the end of the 20th century it got to be more Capital Manglement than glass, but everything is going to heck in a casserole dish.
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This could be a new career path: “Waldo22 Consulting: because you don’t have the kind of idiots required to really idiot-proof that bitch”
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If they would stop putting glass on the back of phones, and would include proper plastic bezels around the edges of the screen, this would barely be an issue. They have to keep inventing stronger and stronger glass, and selling cases, because designers are "style" obsessed morons.
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Horseshit. I have had plastic body phones and they have been just fine
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Plastic backs are awesome and so are plastic screens.
My N900 was one of the best phones I ever used. Plastic body, plastic and resistive touch screen. Could use anything to interact with the screen not just things with the right capacitance values. One time I dropped it while taking video on my bike, it hit the moving front wheel and flew across the parking lot. It was fine.
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I feel like the glad sandwich excuse is letting them off. One side should be in tension and one in compression when bending. So it seems like it doesn't buy you much and there are many materials that are strong in compression as well. It seems like magnetic attachment should work with any non ferromagnetic material.
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A big advantage given by removable batteries in a phone is that a drop becomes much less likely to destroy the phone. When a phone is dropped the energy imparted is1/2MV2, if the battery is removable most of the mass, the battery, is detached from the phone and can generally take care of itself. The rather more delicate and expensive phone is subjected to far less kinetic energy and is much less likely to be damaged.
I once dropped an old phone about 30ft from a scaff tower, it nearly survived. Once reassembled there was a black line on the display but it still worked. Don't talk to me about one metre!
I once dropped an old phone about 30ft from a scaff tower, it nearly survived. Once reassembled there was a black line on the display but it still worked. Don't talk to me about one metre!
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What phones were you using with such a flimsy mechanism for attaching/containing the battery?
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You still have the problem of dust and grit which can very hard & sharp. That said I am surprised there isn't a market for phone-safe pocket stuff, especially considering how big the EDC market is.
It shouldn't be too hard to make a money clip or a folding knife that cannot scratch a phone, keys are probably trickier since you have no control over manufacturers.
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The optical properties of such a setup are presumably not as nice as if you have a screen laminated directly to the back of the glass.
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I knew a guy who dropped his phone and the battery skittered off beneath some shelving, never to be seen again. I had a Samsung flip phone where the battery cover would fall off at the slightest touch after a couple of years. In my work experience, battery contacts are a source of unreliability.
Good riddance.
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It's like that saying:
"Every time you try to make something idiot-proof, the world makes a better idiot." No hold my beer.
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The last phone I had where I owned an extra battery or replaced the battery was a StarTac. And there were a variety between that and my first iPhone that still had replaceable batteries. Even when I had Blackberries, I used an external battery pack instead of buying an extra internal battery, because the external could also charge my iPod. Today, if I had a phone with a replaceable battery, I would probably still go with an external battery because it could also charge my earbuds.
I'm not saying no one should want a replaceable battery. I am saying that it would not provide any value for me.
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HuntingManatees
Ars Centurion
If you accidentally break the glass sandwich while eating it, just use some of of the sauce from your glue pizza to stick it back together!
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That's only for scratching when face down on a surface, and for shattering. My latest phone has some light scratches despite being kept in a seemingly clean pocket without anything else - it's just invisible grit, apparently. I can't see one single scratch on the watch, though of course it's in open air - and sometimes bumped into things, but still.
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Actually, I think the material the movie referenced is aluminum oxynitride. I saw this nice article but I couldn't find anyone using ALON for cell phones. Kyocera is using corundum for the screens of their DuraForce series, though.
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1. Looks.
2. The revenue stream from also replacing the back of the phone.
If it was about structural properties, they could just use a piece of carbon fiber* reinforced plastic. It would be cheaper, tougher and just as rigid.
* I mean continuous fiber cloth - woven or unidirectional, not chopped fiber crap you often find in injection molded parts.
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I'd be much more interested in a material that could survive a drop from two meters (or yards, whatever) onto a surface that closely resembles concrete, as that's about the height that my phone reached when it flew out of my hands after I stumbled on a concrete seam while trying to run for the train and look up the next train in the schedule at the same time.
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