Kyocera has published a new video of its Sapphire Shield smartphone cover in action, pitting it against standard impact-resistant glass in a few drop and scratch tests. As you might expect, the sapphire cover fared much better than the glass. While the glass display was easily scratched and shattered using a piece of granite, the Sapphire Shield looked like it had just come out of the box.
The Sapphire Shield can currently be found on Kyocera’s Brigadier smartphone, which became available from Verizon last week. The phone is currently one of a few to sport a sapphire display, though it’s widely believed that Apple will be debuting such a device early next month.
You can see the full Sapphire Shield stress test below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_7tVP5YHt0]
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I don’t care if that phone was bullet/water/fire proof, it is one of the ugliest phones i’ve ever seen. I would continuously replace my iPhone before i used that.
The drop test was particularly impressive. I had been under the impression sapphire would be more brittle than glass and more prone to shattering. I really hope the iPhone will perform as in this video and lose its fragile reputation.
Shattering happens a lot more from the micro fractures that scratching creates. Remove scratches, you lower the chance of shattering.
Yup what he said, it’s much like how decorators score a tile before breaking it for perfectly cut lines.
Thats why you can expect apple to not just use sapphire. It would make no sense to have a phone that cracks easier. Scratching, cracking, transparency and touch are the 4 equally important factors in a phones screen. Take one away it screws up the balance. Need to have a balance.
Now you can buy the first amazon smartphone (Fire Phone)…
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1) The comparison should have been with Gorilla Glass, not “standard impact-resistant glass.”
2) A single, carefully orchestrated drop does not prove impact resistance.
I once dropped an iPhone 4 on asphalt while bike riding at some speed. The phone appeared unscathed except for some scratches on the aluminum frame. A week later I dropped it from my waist pocket onto a carpeted floor and the screen shattered into a million pieces. Clearly the initial drop did some significant damage (microscopic cracks and/or bending of the frame and compressing of the glass?) which left the display susceptible to even the lightest drop on the softest floor.
Your second statement is exactly why sapphire would be better. Without scratches it has no micro fractures, thus it doesn’t shatter as easily. You’re right though, carefully orchestrated tests prove nothing, just like you can’t believe a thing Corning says about their glass compared to sapphire. They did tests and said it shattered more easily, but guess what? The test clearly stated that was with ‘abrasion’ which means with scratches it shattered more easily, which even assuming that were true, it goes against the entire point of sapphire… The point being that it wouldn’t ever have scratches, and thus you need to test sapphire which has no abrasion, against theirs, which does and does not have abrasion, to test it rationally.