Have any 80-grit sandpaper lying around?
Gorilla Glass producer Corning is going public with a successor to its Victus product from 2020. As smartphone displays have grown bigger and smartphones themselves have gotten heavier, the company says it’s worked to address consumers’ added need for durability with the all-new Gorilla Glass Victus 2.
On brass tacks, Corning says its reformulated aluminosilicate solution can withstand drops of up to 1 meter onto surfaces like concrete (specifically, 80-grit sandpaper) and up to 2 meters on those like asphalt (180 grit).
The company also demonstrates through another lab test video that Victus 2 can survive scratching at a force of 8 Newtons (that’s 8 kiliogram-meters per second squared) whereas a competing product fails to withstand half the force. We see some illustrative, if not impressive results.
Of course, if you dabble in any bit of the tech space on YouTube, you’ll know Zack Nelson of JerryRigEverything loves to perform durability tests — specifically, he tests the scratch resistance of device displays using a set of picks oriented around the qualitative Mohs mineral hardness scale. Most devices generally resist light scratching with a level 6 pick before submitting at a level 7.
It’s hard to give a one-to-one comparison based on the information we’ve been given: unstrengthened, Victus 2 has a Vickers hardness rating of 595kgf/mm² at a 200g load. When strengthened, that goes up to 670kgf/mm² (PDF). Without going into detail — because the math to convert gets messy and is, admittedly, above my pay grade — we’re basically seeing a lateral move on scratch resistance, at least on paper.
Usually, we’d be focusing on comparative figures using previous products as the point of reference, so, albeit in controlled environments, we’re getting a pretty good sense of what Corning Gorilla Glass can do, months before we see it on a commercial device. Speaking of which, Corning also notes that prospective customers have received samples, so the hope is to see Victus 2 on early 2023 smartphones.
That’s great to hear — we’ve been missing homemade drop tests from our content feeds.
