So
It's basically clear aluminum?
Scotty, beam me up!
Man-made sapphire could replace Gorilla Glass as the material of choice for scratch-and-crack-resistant mobile phone screens in the near future, according to a recent speculative piece from MIT Technology Review. According to the research university's mag: Manufactured sapphire — a material that’s used as transparent armor …
No - it's you Brits and we Australians who can't spell it. It's aluminum
IUPAC prefer -ium, and its kinda their bailiwick.
Some of your scientists decided to change it just so it'd fit in with other "ium"s.
Like molybdenium, lanthanium, tantalium and platinium? Certainly, their efforts at consistency were pretty half-hearted.
The assumption here seems to be that Gorilla glass will remain at $3 until and after the sapphire glass industry gets upto speed and reaches the $10 mark? but surely while that is happening, Gorilla glass will continue to get stronger, or it will get cheaper (or both).
Still, that said, being able say my phone has a screen made of aluminium would be cooler than having one made of gorillas...
Many watches costing over a couple of hundred pounds use solid sapphire glasses, sawn from sausage shaped ingots and then shaped and polished with diamond tools.
They are quite, but not completely, scratchproof. However they are definitely NOT shatterproof. Any hope of a sapphire crystal surviving hammering or even a significant drop onto concrete is fantasy.
Sapphire was used for the windows of Eproms - read only memories that could be erased and reused with ultraviolet light. That brings back memories.
It is indeed very hard, but as you say, far from shatterproof. Indeed, the harder a material, in general, the more likely it is to shatter on impact with another hard material, because the impact energy is dissipated in a smaller space. A lot depends on the crystal structure.
>They are quite, but not completely, scratch-proof. However they are definitely NOT shatterproof. Any hope of a sapphire crystal surviving hammering or even a significant drop onto concrete is fantasy
It depends how it is used. A phone screen is thinner than a watch crystal, and it is only the very outer layer that you want to be hard- maybe it could be combined with a more flexible material. I'm thinking of case-hardened spanners, which are hard on the outside, more flexible on the inside so that they don't break when dropped like a drill bit will.
Many Omega watches use sapphire for the watch crystal but the models used in space used an acrylic-like material... acrylic would be less likely to shatter due to extremes in temperature, and even if it did it would be preferable to tiny shards of sapphire floating around in an enclosed environment.
Back down on earth, the things likely to scratch a sapphire watch face are harder stones in jewellery, diamond dust (if you've been a diamond blade in a disc cutter) and sometimes the anti-slip coating at the bottom of swimming pools.
I've got a pretty nondescript Omega I've worn every day for the last ooh ~ decade. Steel bracelet has a nice 'patina' from the casual abuse I've subjected it to, but the glass (which is nicely convex and proud on top) is still absolutely flawless.
Always wondered why phones didn't just use the same stuff - and now understand - and can't wait until they do.
My Omega has a saphire for glass, and I can tell you that when I accidentally hit it with the edge of a spinning grinding disc on an angle-grinder, it saved my wrist from unsightly abarasion, and although metal was smeared accross the glass, this came off, and there was no scratch in the saphire. Incredible stuff, I'll be wanting a phone with that stuff as a screen.
This could explain why my Casio waveceptor is still useable after being variously wacked into brass door handles and steel scaffold poles. And I'd wondered why metal was leaving marks on the "glass" that just polished off. It's predecessor was retired after an encounter with the bottom of a swimming pool.
Maybe they should stop wasting time on sapphire, and move straight to make mobile phone screen out of whatever swimming pool coatings are made of, which is clearly the hardest material in the universe.
Why specifically say the iPhone? There's nothing in this article to suggest that Apple are working on this, or are likely to be the first to use it.
In fact, it's almost certain that the "next iPhone", due out this year will *not* have a sapphire screen - making the title of this otherwise good article doubly stupid.
My guess is the writer of the article was not the writer of the idiotic linkbait headline.
Yeah, also wondering this. I thought when the author said " few chats with people who would know," I thought the Register had found someone with links to people at Apple.
However the article doesn't mention that Apple are going to use this technology or looking at it.
The author seems to have good knowledge of the industry and is providing a very factual and informative article but the whole premise of the article that the next iPhone could be using this undermines it. No evidence (even the "market analyst" quote is mentioned).
Maybe because Apple tends to be on the cutting edge when it comes to materials and designs? okay, some of these designs are bling.
But lets not forget that it was Jobs who introduced the phone market to Gorilla glass when he went looking for a cover for the iPhone 1's screen. Corning had discovered Gorilla glass many years ago and put it on the shelf.
some articles online say that Corning had invented a tough glass (Chemcor) in the 1960s which they stopped producing in the 1990s. Come the smartphone age, they started thinking what they could do, went back to Chemcor and came up with a new (and patentable) formulation which is Gorilla glass.
Because the author was using "iPhone" as shorthand for "mobile phone at the expensive end of the spectrum where design is considered a significant factor in peoples' purchasing decisions".
Take a step back and try to stop taking everything so literally. Language is able to convey more subtlety than that if you allow it.
And so did the more mundane (in comparison to Vertu) Nokia 8800 back in 2006. They even named it one of the variants "Sapphire Arte". If they had only announced it with a flamboyant presentation, patented it and reminded the world how they were 5 years ahead of anybody else...
I'm getting myself a 8800 sirocco just to snottily pull it out of my pocket whenever a twat brandishes a shiny new gadget pontificating about its revolutionary sapphire screen and him being the first human being to ever hold one.
Negative points for the author 'cos of the Apple baitlink + apparently not having a frigging clue that sapphire was used in phone screens even before the iPhone had seen the light of day.