Like every other year, Corning, the leading manufacturer of screen protectors for smartphones, is launching a new version, Gorilla Glass 6. It's the glass / crystal that we'll probably be covering the top terminals of range as early as next year at the Mobile World Congress (although it is not excluded to see it first in the Galaxy Note 9, as was the case with Note 4, which featured Gorilla Glass 4 before its presentation, like the Galaxy Alpha)

Gorilla Glass 6 arrives, as always, with a big promise under the arm. On this occasion, the improvements made by Corning promise that the crystal survives up to 15 falls at a height of one meter on hard surfaces . This, according to the company, assumes to improve twice the performance of Gorilla Glass 5, whose great promise was to protect against falls to 1.6 meters in height. On this occasion, Corning said that 85% of smartphone users have abandoned the terminal once a year. Now the figure they give is that, on average, terminals experience seven annual drops per user, with 50% occurring 1 meter or less.

The improvement comes from the hand of a more resistant material that does not offer much more detail than to say that it was chemically reinforced to offer Gorilla Glass 6 has higher compression levels than its predecessor. Compression reduces the likelihood of fracturing the glass.

Gorilla Glass was installed on more than 6 million devices, which, as we said years ago, made Corning one of the biggest winners. mobile, with Qualcomm or Samsung.

The problem that Gorilla Glass does not solve

The earliest versions of Gorilla Glass have always promoted themselves as resistant to falls, however, Corning strongly emphasized the strength and toughness of Gorilla Glass against scratches or microabrasions . To do this, they showed that contact with the keys was not harmful to the glass and that it could be hit by knives and that the material would resist.

Things have changed a lot since then, and Gorilla Glass 4 the Galaxy S6 notes that although the terminals suffer more abrupt falls, the screens are scratched with extreme ease . It can not be said that the abrasions that occur are deep and are seen in ordinary use environments, although in some cases too. What can be said is that the sun ends up being boring and maintaining a flawless screen, requires, usually using a screen saver.

It is no longer worthwhile to pass the terminal underneath a small saw (which, no matter how much Corning said has never been valid, but at least he was promoted), but any trace of dust or salt in a pocket is capable of much damage . After so many consecutive improvements in breaking strength, it is time to tackle this problem. The problem seems to be that physics requires a balance between the two positions: or strengthens one or the other, but not both at the same time.