Samsung Develops "Unbreakable" Phone Display

Samsung today announced a new type of glass that could dramatically improve the life of your phone display, particularly if you are repeatedly butterfingered.

They've developed a sort of flexible plastic that when paired with one of their flexible OLED panels, can miraculously survive repeated four foot drops (about the usual size of drop if your phone slips out of your pocket or out of your hand when walking down the street).

Samsung has had certification from Underwriters Laboratories (UL) that their new material can survive 26 of these four foot drops and survive.

The key to this materials durability is its flexibility. Traditional phone screen glass is exactly that - glass and therefore brittle and inflexible. Indeed Corning Gorilla Glass 5 states that a device with their latest glass can survive a 1.6m (approx 5 feet) drop 80% of the time. That the new Samsung material survived a similar drop 26 times in a row is an impressively low failure rate.

This new material seems to be a way off from commercial use, but if it works as described and doesn't have particular downsides in terms of usability and registration of gestures and crucially doesn't scratch heavily through use then we might finally be able to say goodbye to costly screen repairs and oversized phone cases.