Synthetic sapphire may be toughest material yet for smartphone screens

If you thought there couldn't be any material tougher than Gorilla glass for smartphone screens, think again: synthetic sapphire promises to make those screens even more rugged.

 

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, GT Advanced Technologies organized a display demo where it showed the virtues of a sapphire screen, tech site CNET reported.

 

"Depending on the exact formula of chemically reinforced glass, sapphire has approximately 2.5 or three times its strength. Apart from being one of the strongest compound materials there is – second only to the diamond that cuts it – synthetic sapphire is highly rigid and won't buckle or melt in high-temperature situations. It is also slow to corrode, conducts heat at low temperatures, and is known for its excellent light transmission for wavelengths well beyond the scope of human vision," GT AT said.

 

CNET's Jessica Dolcourt said that when she tested the sapphire screen, it was "just as responsive as glass when I handled the device."

 

At the demo, the CNET report said a thin, virtually transparent sheet of sapphire was attached to the regular Gorilla glass on an iPhone 5. Efforts to nick it proved futile.

 

But the CNET report also said this comes at a literal cost: A Vertu Ti Android smartphone featuring a sapphire screen is priced above US$10,000.  

CNET said the material may be about "three to four times the cost of regular glass."

 

It also said it takes 16 days and a furnace at 2,200 degrees Celsius to create a 250-pound block of synthetic sapphire.

 

"Today there's not enough capacity to create sapphire displays en masse, but we will see an uptick in adoption at the higher end of the spectrum," it said. – KDM, GMA News