Skip to main content

Sapphire is unscratchable, unbreakable, and the next big thing in touchscreens

Earlier this month, a study showed that 23 percent of iPhone users have screens that are currently broken, and the average person has put up with their broken screen for six months. We can argue about the numbers all day, but chances are almost all of you are afraid of breaking your device screen. Drop your phone from just a few feet and you’re done. It’s over. Your screen has broke. Can you fix it? How do you fix it? Who do you contact? How much will it cost? These are the kind of questions that can ruin your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

We all carry around a smartphone and they’re all covered in highly breakable glass. Sometimes its soda-lime glass and sometimes its made of fancy Gorilla Glass, but even the best screens are still very easy to crack, break, and shatter. It’s no fun, but it may soon be a thing of the past. At Mobile World Congress, I stumbled upon one of the coolest new tech innovations in a very long time. And guess what? It’s as old as the earth itself.

GT Advanced Technologies is a company that manufacturers furnaces that melt down sapphire, and is at MWC this year to tell everyone that the sapphire industry is getting into the gadget screen business in a big way. Your next iPhone or Android device may very well have a sapphire screen. And it could save you a trip to some shady guy’s basement to fix your screen.

gt advanced technologies sapphire screen
Image used with permission by copyright holder

“Gorilla Glass is still glass, so the way that you break glass is that you score it, and then it breaks. So when you scratch your mobile phone, that’s why when you drop your mobile phone it breaks – because there are scratches in it,” Dan Squiller of GT Advanced told us as he let us scratch up a Gorilla Glass screen with a rock. “So, with sapphire, because you cannot scratch it, it doesn’t break. So if you drop your phone, or abuse it, it won’t break. It’s very very rugged. It won’t scratch; it won’t break … You could throw this phone against a cement wall and it won’t break … well, the phone might break, but the screen will stay intact.”

I was easily able to scratch the Gorilla Glass, and shatter it, but couldn’t make a mark on the sapphire. GT Advanced claims that its sapphire is about three times stronger than most chemically strengthened aluminosilicate glass, including Gorilla Glass, Dragontrail glass, soda-lime glass, and Xensation glass.

(I found Corning, maker of Gorilla Glass, at the show this week, but it had no representatives available for comment on how its glass compares to sapphire.)

GT Advanced sapphire bouleGT Advanced demonstrations were compelling, and the science seems to back it up. Sapphire is a naturally growing crystal and is the second hardest substance on earth. It’s so hard, only diamond-tipped saws can cut it. GT Advanced grows sapphire and then melts and hardens them into ‘boules,’ which are 115 kilogram, or 254 lb. clear cylinders. Those cylinders are then cut into cubes, which are then chopped up into slices and shapes as thin and wild as you can imagine.

Sapphire can be made as clear as glass and as thin as you desire, and is the perfect material for a phone or tablet screen because almost nothing can scratch it. The crystal is regularly used in things like jewelry, watches, military windshields, LED TVs, and LED light bulbs, but the sapphire industry is a few years late to the game when it comes to mobile touchscreens.

EVST2079“We’ve only just mounted the effort to sell it into the mobile space,” said Squiller. “We didn’t realize what we had here, but the mobile industry has a huge problem with broken screens. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who come by the booth and take out their phone and show us their shattered phone.”

Right now, the only phone that uses a full sapphire screen is the Vertu TI, an $11,000 Android device. This is partially because of price: A sapphire screen costs a phone manufacturer about three times more than a Gorilla Glass screen, but GT Advanced doesn’t believe cost will be a barrier. Apple’s iPhone 5 uses a sapphire lens for its rear camera.

“Based on the conversations we’ve had with OEMS [Original Equipment Manufacturers], they’re willing to pay up to $15 or $20 for a better screen,” explained Squiller. “This will be $10 to $15 more expensive than Gorilla Glass. I think that [Gorilla Glass] display – that display that you just ruined – I think that was about $5 or $6 and we’re going to be at about $15 or so.”

But even if it takes a while to get phone and tablet makers like Apple and Samsung onboard, you won’t have to wait too long. Squiller already showed us prototype sapphire iPhone 5 screen protectors and replacement screens that will add next to no bulk to your device, and be available for anyone to buy “next year at this time,” or early 2014. 

There are plenty of ways phones need to improve their durability in the years to come, but if sapphire screens take off, we might be able to scratch broken screens off the list. Or, then again, if today’s demonstration was any indication, maybe we won’t.

Update 3-21-2013 by Jeff: MIT Technology Review has brought sapphire screens back into the news cycle today. Verifying much of what we reported here, some analysts now believe that sapphire may indeed pose a threat to screen technologies from companies like Gorilla Glass as its price falls in the next few years. 

“I’m convinced that some will start testing the water and release some high-end smartphones using sapphire in 2013,” Eric Virey of Yole Developpement, a market research firm, told MIT.

(Photos by Ben Nelson, Envision Studio)

Article originally published 2-27-2013.

Jeffrey Van Camp
Former Digital Trends Contributor
As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more