Corning’s Gorilla Glass Victus 2 can better survive drops on sidewalks and roads

Corning’s Gorilla Glass is used in a lot of high-end smartphones, and now the company is promising even tougher displays with its latest version, Victus 2. The new glass composition offers improved drop performance on rough surfaces like concrete, the company says, while offering the same scratch resistance as the original Victus.

The first Victus glass released two years ago promised that your screen could survive drops of two meters (6.5 feet), but the new version ups the ante. Corning said it aimed to create glass that was durable enough to “better survive drops from waist height onto rougher surfaces,” to start with. It also noted that smartphones are 15 percent heavier and 10 percent larger than they were four years ago, which increases the stress on the display.

“In lab testing, Gorilla Glass Victus 2 survived drops of up to one meter on a surface replicating concrete,” the company said, noting that competing solutions could fail at half a meter or less. At the same time, “Victus 2 continued to survive drops up to two meters on a surface replicating asphalt and maintained scratch resistance up to four times better than competitive aluminosilicate,” according to Corning.

There’s no word on which devices will get Victus 2 displays first, but I wouldn’t go dropping one on the road to test the claims — they’re based on lab tests, unlike typical random phone drop accidents. There’s no doubt the screens are widely used though. Corning said that its product is “designed into more than 8 billion devices by more than 45 major brands.” Apple is a major investor in the company, having poured in $250 million in investments several years ago.