Unbreakable phone screens could be made with a new material

Unbreakable is an exaggeration. I want something that will not break when dropped from 4 to 5 feet onto irregualar concrete. Phone are pretty good, but mine is glass front and back and I dont wrap it in a case. Have dropped it a few times and got lucky. I just dont want to rely on that luck.

metadat• 5 years ago

Screens of today weaken structurally (invisibly) with every drop until eventually reaching the point of failing and cracking.

Animats2• 5 years ago

Unscratchable is available. There's glass with a sapphire layer. Sapphire glass is often used for checkout scanners. Home Depot uses it.

Apple tried to use sapphire glass for phone screens around 2014, but only succeeded in driving their sapphire maker into bankruptcy.

loehnsberg• 5 years ago

Sapphire glass has also been used in premium wrist watches for ages. These watches don't scratch. And when you drop the watch on the face from table height, say, it's more likely that the mechanics inside break than the glass.

I suppose that it is more difficult to handle in production, especially when you're aiming at a large surface area. But if scanners have it, this issue does not seem to be insurmountable.

Many customers would probably pay extra if they would get a phone that's as tough as a wrist watch but does not require a case.

floatboth• 5 years ago

HTC actually made a phone with real sapphire glass..

3232• 5 years ago

How do you manage to scratch your phone? These days it's almost impossible on flagship phones.

Maybe you mean on the back, where sometimes they use cheaper glass?

barrkel• 5 years ago

Having it slide across an otherwise flat surface with indeterminate grit on it usually does the trick.

Aluminium oxide, for example - it comes off as white powder on motorcycle engines - and is pretty hard stuff, the same stuff as sapphire and ruby. That can end up on surfaces via motorcycle gloves if you ride motorbikes, if not from your own bike, then grit thrown up by tyres on a wet day.

I mean, phones don't scratch easily, but they do acquire a tiny scratch or two every few months, and a bad scratch maybe once or twice a year.

davesque2• 5 years ago

As much as people sometimes react negatively to stories like this (where some technology shows early promise in a research lab), I just now realized that I actually really like this kind of popular science reporting. It's concise, includes a few interesting tidbits of materials science, and overall conveys a sense of technological hope and optimism to the reader. Of course, we all know that technologies described in articles like this are often a long ways off from commercialization, if they ever achieve that at all. But I remember a time when OLED tech was described in the exact same way in the 2000s. Here's hoping that perovskite tech eventually amounts to something.

questiondev• 5 years ago

thank you for bringing this up, it’s one of those things that younger me did not understand, i see the pessimism surrounding new technology and i want to point out to doubters that it will take longer than they expect but it will come. like you mentioned oled.

a lot goes into building and refining the production process but once it starts, oh baby pandora’s box is open.

kurthr2• 5 years ago

I agree with your general feeling that new technologies need to be given a certain benefit of the doubt since by definition they are far from production... we literally don't know how or what they would be used for.

However, in this case I have a little bit too much knowledge about the field and I have to say that it's "not even wrong"... it reads like gibberish. Yes perovskites can be used to generate nano-particles which generate light on amorphous glass substrates. But the need to use lead based materials, or glass substrates, the difficulty of manufacture or the low efficiency, and so on are not advantages. They are disadvantages.

In summary this discovery takes us no closer to unbreakable phone screens for a multitude of reasons, but primarily because what breaks (cracks, shatters, scratches, yields) is the cover glass rather than for example the OLED display, which are now primarily made from/on flexible substrates anyway. It is solving some orthogonal set of problems that are not laid out in the article, and which I as an expert am unable determine after reading it without searching for the original source material.

davesque2• 5 years ago

in this case I have a little bit too much knowledge about the field and I have to say that it's "not even wrong"... it reads like gibberish.

Good to know I guess. I should clarify that the information I get actually doesn't have anything to do with the particular topic. It could be gibberish as you say and it would still give me a sense that someone's out there trying to iterate and experimenting with new tech. That in itself is nice to know. As with OLEDs, in a lot of cases it's not gibberish. But I assume some percentage of stories like this are gibberish. It still makes me happy that people are trying push things forward and that someone cared enough to write a story about it.

fnord77• 5 years ago

I mean the Economist cannot get economic reporting right; I don't see how they'd do well with technology reporting

plattenbau• 5 years ago

Would you say there are any instances where "technological hope" could be a bad thing?

NullPrefix• 5 years ago

SINCE 2006, when Corning, an American glassmaker, developed Gorilla Glass to give Apple’s first iPhone a scratch-resistance screen

This editorial seems very Apple centric, not generic science centric.

Gorilla Glass 1 released in 2006, iPhone 1 released summer of 2007.

JoeAltmaier2• 5 years ago

Is it in dispute, that Gorilla Glass was developed for the iPhone? There's a famous story of Steve Jobs visiting the CEO of Corning, saying they needed the stronger glass in 1 year and when told "That's impossible" responded with something like "Don't be afraid. You can do it" and other such things. Called the reality distortion field, Steve Jobs was famous for convincing people that they could do the impossible.

Dylan16807• 5 years ago

Are they claiming new glass that is tougher than existing glass, or is this 'just' a way to embed very tough LEDs into glass? As long as there's still glass in front, then it doesn't really matter how tough the LEDs/LCDs are. We don't need those to be tougher, we need the glass to be tougher.

Edit: Did I say something wrong? I legitimately don't know what the article is claiming, and is there something I'm overlooking?

hn_throwaway_99• 5 years ago

It also prevents lead ions, which are toxic, leaching out of the material. At the end of their lives, the screens would be recyclable.

"Would be recyclable" and "will be recycled" are totally different things.

I think this is a cool article, but I wish it wouldn't try to sweep the environmental and toxicity issues under the rug with statements like "would be recyclable".

Red_Leaves_Flyy• 5 years ago

Doing the right thing is expensive in many different ways; time, money, opportunity, etc.

Whenever a company exploits a process to squeeze out extra profit we all assume the newly externalized costs. All products should be recycled at the end of their life and the costs involved should be built into the price. Some states mandate a redeemable deposit for cans and bottles. Perhaps every the United States could craft a responsible recycling program that tacks an appropriate tax onto a product that reflects the cost of a recycling the worst 10% off products in a category. I gladly pay to safely dispose my household waste responsibly, why must I continue to pay for companies that cleverly escape bearing these costs? The harms have been exhaustively calculated and established. I’m sick of being terrorized by belligerent psychopaths that feel entitled to pollute and contaminate everything they set their insatiable eyes upon.

stevenhuang• 5 years ago

You can't have the latter without the former.

rootusrootus3• 5 years ago

What was wrong with the plastic screens a few phones had a few years ago? My wife had a Motorola from Verizon, some kind of droid, I don't recall the specific name (droid turbo 2, maybe?). It was basically a Verizon-specific version of the Moto X, but it had a plastic screen. We put a tempered glass screen protector over the top, and it was impossible to discern that the screen itself was plastic.

Edit: Went back and found a review of that phone, and I guess reviewers hated it. The screen wasn't as bright because the AMOLED screen wasn't bonded directly to a glass front. Oh well. My wife liked it just fine.

tdeck• 5 years ago

Moreover, what happened with just putting a small border around the glass with a raised lip? I owned several generations of Droids that I seemed to drop constantly and this protected them every time. Modern phones are designed to be ultra-fragile with glass going right to the edge, so we can appreciate the elegance before we stuff them into a bulky case forever.

rootusrootus3• 5 years ago

I agree. Apple is perhaps largely to blame for this. I am a happy iPhone customer, but I cannot deny that I don't really appreciate some of their hardware design choices. Very slippery, so the very first thing I do is put it in a case. So it doesn't matter if it's elegant and beautiful, it's in a TPU case so I don't drop it. Last time I had an iPhone that I didn't use a case for was the 4S. I still think that may have been peak iPhone in some ways.

I have a 13 Pro Max coming Monday, and guess what, sitting on my desk in front of me is the case it will go into immediately after I take it out of the package. Kinda sad. Someone said they're not as slippery as the older phones, but have sharp edges. Okay on something the size of a 4S, not so okay on something the size of a small tablet.

magicalhippo• 5 years ago

How many buy new phones before they otherwise would have due to broken screens?

csunbird• 5 years ago

Plastic scratches very, very easily!

rootusrootus3• 5 years ago

Yes, which is why the first thing we did was put on a tempered glass screen protector. Then the surface is glass. But if it breaks, it is easily replaced.

dzhiurgis3• 5 years ago

So does gorilla glass

alpaca128• 5 years ago

Or, in my case, they could just make the back of the phone less smooth than a space telescope mirror so it doesn't slide off a flat table surface over the course of 20 minutes. But it looks really great in the marketing renders, so that's nice I guess.

cannaceo• 5 years ago

When Google did this with the Nexus 4 I broke three of them in one week while I waited for a case to arrive.

sgc• 5 years ago

I won't even unbox without a case on hand. I know myself!

wyre2• 5 years ago

When I bought my iPhone SE I went to the dollar store for a case while I waited for a case to arrive via mail.

bamboozled• 5 years ago

Also, let's have brands make the back stronger so they stop breaking? Some how the screen of my phone seems to be stronger than the back, which is shattered into a thousand pieces.

3232• 5 years ago

For a number of years I had read how each generation of Gorrila Glass is 50% or something stronger, yet I was still experiencing broken phones.

So I did a deep dive, long story short, when Gorilla Glass makes a stronger glass, the phone makers make the screen thinner, so we are back to square one.

FridayoLeary• 5 years ago

What's better? Thinner phones or stronger screens?

christophilus• 5 years ago

Stronger screens.

8organicbits• 5 years ago

Screens that are not cracked, whatever the needed strength and thickness may be.

R0b0t1• 5 years ago

The very marginal increase in thinness is pointless. They should be going with unbreakable screens.

Grakel• 5 years ago

Sufficient thinness was reached like ten years ago. Imagine the battery life we could have.

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

Give me a phone twice as thick as my iPhone and stuff it full of batteries and better antennas, and remove the camera bump. I will buy.

bgro• 5 years ago

Ah, so same as the battery situation. New battery tech or revised software that works more efficiently? Great, we can make the battery smaller. That's all customers care about-- a thinner phone that can go in a bulky phone case!

I don't remember anybody ever complaining about the size of their phone. And although I have literally never heard it, I could in theory believe a small minority of people might want a thinner phone if competitors were able to do it.

I don't buy that the phone manufacturers couldn't work together and agree to release "thicker" phones with reasonable battery though, as they do on just about every other industry feature.

I assume it's just an excuse for them to further close the abilities of right to repair where serviceable or otherwise reasonable batteries would lead to less new phone sales. Exactly the same situation as the screens, I'm sure. Just keep quiet about these things though when marketing this.

guywhocodes2• 5 years ago

I complain every day that there are essentially zero android phones that fit in my one hand any more. Everything is larger than 6" these days

hermitdev• 5 years ago

I had a Samsung Galaxy S4, I think? Back when they still had removable batteries... Anyways, the phone was too tall to fit comfortably in my pocket, would dig into my hip and end up partially under my seat belt while driving. Eventually, the damn thing ended up bent, about inch from the top of the screen. Glass didn't break or crack, but the phone sorta looked like a bendy straw, mostly straightened if you looked at it on edge from the side. Still worked perfectly fine for quite a while with that bend, though. Definitely was too thin for my casual use.

Id prefer a slightly thicker phone with a slightly smaller screen, the better to actually fit in my pants pocket.

Gigachad4• 5 years ago

This hasn’t been true for a while. The iPhone hit peak thinness a while ago and they have been getting thicker every year. The battery life on the latest iPhones is much better this year than last.

And on weight, I find the 13 pro to be ok but the 13 pro max was too much. So what they have now is the limit of what I want the weight to be.

romwell2• 5 years ago

FYI, Moto G Power is a $200 phone with a battery that lasts 2-3 days.

It's the best phone I've ever had.

With a 512GB SD card, and a built-in fat battery, I never have to worry about running out either of storage or power. It's liberating.

And the camera is good enough that the storage does fill up.

mattlondon• 5 years ago

I would certainly like a thinner phone. Lighter too please.

hermes8329• 5 years ago

I wish they would lay off on making phones thinner. They have become unusable without a case.

The casing should simply be built in so the cool coloring, texture or material the phone offers can actually be seen

dghughes• 5 years ago

I noticed with the first generation Gorilla Glass I could do anything with it. I could put my phone in my pocket with keys and coins no problem. Then the next phone I got and my house key scratched it the very first day.

My wild theory was the key was an aluminum (alloy) and it corroded creating corundum since there was no way a key could scratch the screen. I was just trying to console myself that I wasn't stupid and careless there were bigger forces at play.

GekkePrutser3• 5 years ago

I dropped my iPhone 1 on a concrete ramp screen down (no screen protector either) and it slid all the way to the bottom, still screen facing down.

I picked it up dreading a shattered display but there wasn't a scratch on it. The steel bezel was damaged though.

Gorilla glass 1 with the thickness they used was indeed awesome.

cglong• 5 years ago

This aligns with my observations too, but would love some empirical data to back this up if you still have them :)

madaxe_again• 5 years ago

Why would any manufacturer want an unbreakable screen? The market for screen replacements is huge - they would likely face class action suits from third party repair shops, and would lose revenue themselves from the sale of replacement screens.

whimsicalism• 5 years ago

Class action lawsuits? Uh, no..

joe__f• 5 years ago

I just put a glass screen protector on my phone and a thin plastic case that goes round the back. I drop it reasonably regularly and I've never had a broken screen, it's a Samsung A series. I guess it costs about £10 for the case and glass layer, but that's not much

KronisLV2• 5 years ago

After being worried about having fragile phones, i simply opted to go for function over form. This is my current phone, Ulefone Armor X7 Pro: https://www.gsmarena.com/ulefone_armor_x7_pro-10293.php

While there are more sophisticated models in this space, for something of a budget oriented phone (which i'll probably use until the battery degrades, seeing as unfortunately it doesn't have a removable one), it's both usable and feels rugged enough.

No longer do i have to worry much about things like dust/sand or even splashes of water and such. It actually fell once from about 1.5 meters out of my pocket and on stone bricks, while i was doing pull ups. I'm sure that the situation would have been worse if it had landed screen down, but even after landing on its corner, there was no visible damage afterwards.

Plus, after using it for a while, i've found that the larger form factor doesn't bother me in the slightest, so i'm not exactly sure why modern phones are so obsessed with being thing. Then again, i also enjoy the form factor of ThinkPads, while there are people out there who call them ugly and too bulky.

tunap2• 5 years ago

My old Nokia 900 slipped from my pocket years ago as I climbed through a roof hatch, fell 25ft and exploded on the concrete floor. I collected the body, the sim, sim holder, SD card, SD holder, bezel, battery and battery cover and put all the pieces back together. It powered up and worked 100%, despite some cosmetic crinkle in the bezel.

This year alone, I have had 3 phones slip or drop 2-3 ft(< 1m), from my pocket or hand, onto carpet and sand, and all came up with cracked glass, one with a screen that no longer lit up.

Elegant fragility is the engineered intention, IMO For truth in advertising, they should rebrand it "Fragile Flower Glass"©.

Tagbert2• 5 years ago

“Stronger” is a term than can mean a couple of things. The two main properties of “strength” are hardness and break resistance. The problem is that usually, when you you increase hardness, you make the glass less resistant to breaking. The glass becomes more brittle. Phone makers have to balance those two properties when designing their phones.

Making glass thinner would actually make it less likely to break as it allows a little more flex to the glass. Making it thinner might compromise some other property of the glass so I’m not sure why they don’t use super thin glass.

ksec• 5 years ago

I think some day there is a possibility of going without the glass. And the whole display is simply a Plastic OLED but with a scratch resistance layer on top. Unfortunately it make the screen "feels" a little less luxurious.

dzhiurgis3• 5 years ago

I consider last couple of iPhone screens unbreakable, but they scratch at a whiff of a wind. 1 week of use and it’s already badly scratched. Not really visible with normal use tho.

Godel_unicode2• 5 years ago

How is that possible? I've never used a screen protector, never used a case, and the only screen-related problem I've had was when someone else knocked my phone out of my hand. Do you live in a rock tumbler...?

Gigachad4• 5 years ago

Depends on your tolerance for scratches. All modern screens get these micro scratches which are visible with the screen off in the light, but go away with the screen on. Those scratches show up within days of perfectly normal use but the majority of people don’t even notice or care.

dzhiurgis3• 5 years ago

Put your phone with airpods or something similar (I don't own any keys) and it instantly scratches.

It's not awful - but scratches are there.

crossroadsguy2• 5 years ago

Why is it so difficult to even entertain the idea that phone makers want the screen, and now the back of the phone as well, to keep breaking?

They want customers to keep paying to repair those screens and backs and keep buying new phones more often.

causi• 5 years ago

For me the resistance to breaking and scratching is more than sufficient and has been for a while. As someone who grew up using PDAs with plastic resistive screens, I haven't scratched a phone screen since 2011, let alone broken one. What I want is folding screens with good scratch resistance.

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

https://archive.md/8ftkB

screenbreakout• 5 years ago

I was always hoping we'd get to using liquid lense and screen you can roll up

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrowetting#:~:text=Elect....

https://www.flexenable.com/technology/flexible-olcd/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266081727_Electrowe...

Unbreakable phone screens could be made with a new material

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