Gorilla Glass 6 Unveiled for New Oppo Smartphone

Corning, the company that makes the ultra-strong glass Gorilla Glass, has an even stronger variant on the way. Called Gorilla Glass 6, it’s their strongest one yet, and it’s a doozy. This time around, the glass-maker will ship it first with the newest Oppo flagship phone, on that is as-yet unnamed. However, Oppo has a solid track record in China of making cutting-edge phones.

Oppo: Chinese Innovators

While in the West Apple, Samsung and Google are the biggest names in smartphones, China is a different market indeed. Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi, OnePlus and Oppo dominate the market there. While Americans tend to measure their success with the newest models of cars, in China it’s more common to see wealthy people flaunting their new phones. This is due to a number of factors, but primarily is due to the ubiquity of public transit and relative lack of usefulness of personal vehicles.

Oppo, for their part, is a highly-respected and excellent brand. Their phones tend towards the higher-end of smartphones, and their most recent designs are reminiscent of Apple’s iPhone X. Design features like the edge-to-edge screen, minimized bezels, phone notch and glass back are mainstays in the Chinese market. In fact, these designs are even seen on mid- to low-end phones by some manufacturers.

Corning and Gorilla Glass 6

The name Gorilla Glass should sound familiar: it’s the screen and back of most modern smartphones. If your smartphone is mid- to high-end, has a glass back or it generally just durable, odds are good it’s Corning’s Gorilla Glass. That is to say, if you’re a fan of high-end smartphones, odds are good you’ll be seeing Gorilla Glass 6 in the US soon.

The next Oppo flagship is due out in a matter of weeks, which means we could see Gorilla Glass 6 in the US as soon as the next few months. The newest batch of phones from Apple, Samsung, LG and Google are all due out this fall. It seems likely that many of these new phones will come with the newest, toughest material from Corning.

The new Gorilla Glass is rated for at least 15 drops from one meter off the ground. That’s double the number Gorilla Glass 5 could handle, which inspires a great amount of confidence. One of the biggest issues with glass-backed phones is durability. As such, it’s good that smartphone manufacturers are teaming with Corning to make them more durable.