Corning Gorilla Glass Protects Cowon's S9

Cowon

By: Grahm Skee on February 5, 2009 5:52 PM

Corning is on the cutting edge of all things made out of glass, everything from eyeglasses, to astronomy optics, to fiber optics, all the way to 4 ton panes of nuclear shielded window glass (yeah that serious). One of the things they make for the consumer electronics industry is Gorilla Glass which is a chemically hardened glass made to flex beyond what normal glass would and fend off hard objects that would typically crack glass. Corning’s site mentions that this material is available in 0.5mm to 2mm and having looked at the S9 apart it appears to be the 0.5mm thickness. Having used the S9 first hand (S9 review) for quite some time I can vouch for its toughness and would love to see more device manufactures use this technology.

You can find more about Gorilla Glass on Corning’s site along with the Cowon S9 announcement. There is also a really cool video demo on that site showing off its ruggedness, but I have also embedded it below for you convenience. (thanks Olley)

Comments

Fuzzypits on February 5, 2009 7:48 PM

Wow, that's actually really interesting! Good find!

Hirudin on February 6, 2009 6:21 AM

This really sold me on this player (again)... Then I remembered that this player doesn't let you rate songs, and I got sad.

If I'm wrong and this player CAN rate songs Cowon may have themselves a new customer.

Friday13th on February 6, 2009 8:27 AM

this looks like the perfect screen for me!. (seeing as I am ridiculously clumsy)

aki on February 6, 2009 11:40 AM

Wow, i might buy this when the chrome version comes out!

Joe on February 12, 2009 5:06 PM

It is too bad the body is made of such cheap plastic in comparison to the glass. The entire body should be made of metal, not plastic. I passed on it for this very reason. Hopefully Sony will do better...

Luke on February 18, 2009 10:56 AM

unfortunatley, my s9 now has a 2 inch crack in the glass after a drop onto a carpeted floor from about 6 feet - I thought it would be tougher than that

jared connell on February 27, 2009 9:18 PM

thats a good idea. i've had 2 iphones that the screen broke and i know many other people who have broken iphone screens as well.

..... on August 4, 2009 4:45 AM

Yah im so convinced with their quality after seeing this picture when a guy dropped his cowon s9 and got this cracked screen

http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/4320/p1010018yak.jpg

anyway im getting a case for my cowon

David on September 5, 2009 7:37 PM

I'm no expert when it comes to chemistry or relative hardness of materials, so I may be incorrect.

That said, corning says that its gorilla glass (http://www.corning.com/WorkArea/showcontent.aspx?id=26021) is an alkali-aluminosilicate.

I'm not exactly sure what that is, but topaz is an aluminum silicate (presumably about the same hardness) - "aluminum silicate fluoride hydroxide"

I started looking this stuff up because I wanted to know if I had to worry about sand scratching the S9 screen.

So, on the Moh scale, the hardness is probably around topaz (8), definitely harder than quartz (7) - so there shouldn't be any problem.

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