Dropping your phone and breaking its screen is your worst nightmare.
Phone makers use chemically strengthened glass (Gorilla Glass), shatterproof coatings, and sometimes coated sapphire crystals to help prevent cracks if your phone is dropped. Now, one company says it's working with a phone maker to test the first phone screen with diamond glass.
However, we have to wait until 2019.
Screen breakage is a common problem. Akhan's diamond glass uses a nanocrystal pattern that randomly arranges the crystals, rather than surrounding them in crystal planes – this arrangement discourages deep cracks from forming and damaging the materials underneath.
Made with lab-grown diamonds, Akhan Semiconductor's Miraj Diamond Glass promises to be stronger than other materials used to cover fragile electronic phone screens. It can be applied in combination with other materials, such as Gorilla Glass, as a top layer.
Initially, Adam Khan, CEO of Akhan, promised that we would see it on its first device by the end of 2017, which did not happen.
Now, Khan says the promising new technology is being actively tested with device manufacturers, whose identities Khan is not prepared to reveal. Akhan’s collaborators are testing the durability of the diamond glass and making sure the surface transmits electrical signals well, so your finger can navigate the touchscreen without causing a problem.
Before diamond glass can make it into a phone, the partners need to work out the details of production and manufacturing using a new material like diamond. They need to make sure that the diamond glass coating is applied evenly on top of the cover material, which could be Gorilla Glass.
They also work to minimize the reflectivity of the diamond glass, which is how much light bounces back to the user. Phone screens with higher reflectivity are harder to read because they interfere with glare. This requires you to increase the brightness to combat reflection, which then drains the phone's battery faster.
While the diamond-encrusted glass could come to any device with a screen, Khan says his company will only work with one vendor from each category, starting with just one phone and one screen protector. If all goes well, it could expand to fitness bands and other devices.
2019 is still a long way off for us to expect a phone that will ease our fears of a broken screen. Don't expect it to be cheap, though. The process of manufacturing and applying lab-grown diamond to the phone's cover material comes at a cost.
