More than 1 billion smartphones are sold in the world each year and manufacturers all face the same challenge: how to make the touchscreen glass more resistant. Screen breakage is now the leading type of phone damage.<\/p>\n
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At New York based glass-maker Corning, researchers are working on ways to make smartphone screens stronger. Corning manufactures the touchscreen glass for smartphones by leading brands like Apple and Samsung. Screens are tested to see how they respond to pressure, to being dropped and to falling objects. The researchers even test how phones fare when they bump against keys, coins and other items inside users\u2019 pockets and purses.<\/p>\n
\u201cDevices are getting thinner. They\u2019re getting larger. They\u2019re getting potentially more massive. They have shaped-cover glass. They have curved-cover glass. And so all of that puts higher stresses on the cover glass during things like drop events,\u201d says Corning research manager Joshua Jacobs.<\/p>\n
Squaretrade, an insurance company for electronic devices, also carries out its own tests. More than half of its phone claims are for cracked screens. The latest phones from the two leading phone makers \u2013 Apple\u2019s iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and Samsung\u2019s Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge Plus \u2013 mix zinc into the aluminium frames for improved strength. The displays also use ion-strengthened glass. But the risk zero simply doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell all I can tell is from history, everything they\u2019ve done has clearly increased the strength of phones but people keep breaking them,\u201d says Squaretrade co-founder and executive chairman Steve Abernethy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More than 1 billion smartphones are sold in the world each year and manufacturers all face the same challenge: how to make the touchscreen glass more resistant. Screen breakage is now the leading type of phone damage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12,18],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gallery","tag-image","tag-wordpress"],"yoast_head":"\n