Gorilla Glass Victus can survive a head-height drop and Samsung gets first dibs

Corning, the makers of the Gorilla Glass tech that’s been saving our bacon from clumsy smartphone spills for years, has revealed the newest version of the tech – Gorilla Glass Victus.
The headline feature of the glass, which succeeds Gorilla Glass 6, is the ability to withstand a 2-metre drop onto a hard, rough surface without breaking. That’s more than twice as effective as its competitors, which will typically crack or break when dropped from around 0.8-metres.
We wouldn’t want to put a head-height drop-test pledge to the test, but it’s good to know for when a phone slips out of our hands during a high-angle selfie.
The company said it has doubled the scratch resistance compared to Gorilla Glass 6. Also, “the scratch resistance of Gorilla Glass Victus is up to 4x better than competitive aluminosilicate glasses,” the company says in a press release on Thursday.
Related: Best phone 2020
The good news for Samsung fans is that it’ll be debuting the technology in its phones in the near future. Given the timing of this announcement, we wouldn’t mind betting the Galaxy Note 20 will arrive rocking the Victus glass on August 5.
Gorilla Glass has been on 8 billion devices from 45 major brands’ laptops, tablets and smartphones, so it won’t be long before Victus is protecting gadgets from beyond the Samsung stable.
“Dropped phones can result in broken phones, but as we developed better glasses, phones survived more drops but also showed more visible scratches, which can impact the usability of devices,” said John Bayne, a senior vice president and general manager at Corning. “Instead of our historic approach of asking our technologists to focus on a single goal – making the glass better for either drop or scratch – we asked them to focus on improving both drop and scratch, and they delivered with Gorilla Glass Victus.”