13 ms·
Unbreakable phone screens could be made with a new material
- rbanffy 5y agoArchived here https://archive.md/8ftkB https://archive.md/8ftkB
- Datenstrom 5y agoChallenge accepted
- sideshowb 5y ago...by my 4yo
- trevcanhuman 5y agoThis sounds like you’ve bought baby-proof bowls [0] for your kid and have unfortunately failed. [0] https://youtu.be/wfWMs_0wd_g https://youtu.be/wfWMs_0wd_g
- Choco31415 5y ago…by the Hydraulic Press Channel.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoBut will it blend? That is the question. https://youtube.com/channel/UCnFP0IU4gpnmcLnVzDLUtfw https://youtube.com/channel/UCnFP0IU4gpnmcLnVzDLUtfw
- najqh 5y agoI don't want unbreakable, I want... unscratchable.
- 323 5y agoHow do you manage to scratch your phone? These days it's almost impossible on flagship phones. Maybe you mean on the back, where sometimes they use cheaper glass?
- barrkel 5y agoHaving it slide across an otherwise flat surface with indeterminate grit on it usually does the trick. Aluminium oxide, for example - it comes off as white powder on motorcycle engines - and is pretty hard stuff, the same stuff as sapphire and ruby. That can end up on surfaces via motorcycle gloves if you ride motorbikes, if not from your own bike, then grit thrown up by tyres on a wet day. I mean, phones don't scratch easily, but they do acquire a tiny scratch or two every few months, and a bad scratch maybe once or twice a year.
- ggfgg 5y agoI still don’t get how people manage to fuck up their phones so badly. Last five iPhones I’ve had were sold on in mint condition. I go cycling, hiking, climbing, camping with the things in a cheap TPU case and no screen protector. They are my primary outdoor navigation device, my camera and are used for 4-6 hours a day solid. I also drop the things occasionally. Do people put their 1000 buck investment in a pocket full of old bolts, keys and sand paper?!? I just don’t understand how you even scratch one.
- phkahler 5y agoUnbreakable is an exaggeration. I want something that will not break when dropped from 4 to 5 feet onto irregualar concrete. Phone are pretty good, but mine is glass front and back and I dont wrap it in a case. Have dropped it a few times and got lucky. I just dont want to rely on that luck.
- metadat 5y agoScreens of today weaken structurally (invisibly) with every drop until eventually reaching the point of failing and cracking.
- davesque 5y agoAs much as people sometimes react negatively to stories like this (where some technology shows early promise in a research lab), I just now realized that I actually really like this kind of popular science reporting. It's concise, includes a few interesting tidbits of materials science, and overall conveys a sense of technological hope and optimism to the reader. Of course, we all know that technologies described in articles like this are often a long ways off from commercialization, if they ever achieve that at all. But I remember a time when OLED tech was described in the exact same way in the 2000s. Here's hoping that perovskite tech eventually amounts to something.
- questiondev 5y agothank you for bringing this up, it’s one of those things that younger me did not understand, i see the pessimism surrounding new technology and i want to point out to doubters that it will take longer than they expect but it will come. like you mentioned oled. a lot goes into building and refining the production process but once it starts, oh baby pandora’s box is open.
- kurthr 5y agoI agree with your general feeling that new technologies need to be given a certain benefit of the doubt since by definition they are far from production... we literally don't know how or what they would be used for. However, in this case I have a little bit too much knowledge about the field and I have to say that it's "not even wrong"... it reads like gibberish. Yes perovskites can be used to generate nano-particles which generate light on amorphous glass substrates. But the need to use lead based materials, or glass substrates, the difficulty of manufacture or the low efficiency, and so on are not advantages. They are disadvantages. In summary this discovery takes us no closer to unbreakable phone screens for a multitude of reasons, but primarily because what breaks (cracks, shatters, scratches, yields) is the cover glass rather than for example the OLED display, which are now primarily made from/on flexible substrates anyway. It is solving some orthogonal set of problems that are not laid out in the article, and which I as an expert am unable determine after reading it without searching for the original source material.
- 5y ago
- Dylan16807 5y agoAre they claiming new glass that is tougher than existing glass, or is this 'just' a way to embed very tough LEDs into glass? As long as there's still glass in front, then it doesn't really matter how tough the LEDs/LCDs are. We don't need those to be tougher, we need the glass to be tougher. Edit: Did I say something wrong? I legitimately don't know what the article is claiming, and is there something I'm overlooking?
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago> It also prevents lead ions, which are toxic, leaching out of the material. At the end of their lives, the screens would be recyclable. "Would be recyclable" and "will be recycled" are totally different things. I think this is a cool article, but I wish it wouldn't try to sweep the environmental and toxicity issues under the rug with statements like "would be recyclable".
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y agoDoing the right thing is expensive in many different ways; time, money, opportunity, etc. Whenever a company exploits a process to squeeze out extra profit we all assume the newly externalized costs. All products should be recycled at the end of their life and the costs involved should be built into the price. Some states mandate a redeemable deposit for cans and bottles. Perhaps every the United States could craft a responsible recycling program that tacks an appropriate tax onto a product that reflects the cost of a recycling the worst 10% off products in a category. I gladly pay to safely dispose my household waste responsibly, why must I continue to pay for companies that cleverly escape bearing these costs? The harms have been exhaustively calculated and established. I’m sick of being terrorized by belligerent psychopaths that feel entitled to pollute and contaminate everything they set their insatiable eyes upon.
- stevenhuang 5y agoYou can't have the latter without the former.
- rootusrootus 5y agoWhat was wrong with the plastic screens a few phones had a few years ago? My wife had a Motorola from Verizon, some kind of droid, I don't recall the specific name (droid turbo 2, maybe?). It was basically a Verizon-specific version of the Moto X, but it had a plastic screen. We put a tempered glass screen protector over the top, and it was impossible to discern that the screen itself was plastic. Edit: Went back and found a review of that phone, and I guess reviewers hated it. The screen wasn't as bright because the AMOLED screen wasn't bonded directly to a glass front. Oh well. My wife liked it just fine.
- tdeck 5y agoMoreover, what happened with just putting a small border around the glass with a raised lip? I owned several generations of Droids that I seemed to drop constantly and this protected them every time. Modern phones are designed to be ultra-fragile with glass going right to the edge, so we can appreciate the elegance before we stuff them into a bulky case forever.
- rootusrootus 5y agoI agree. Apple is perhaps largely to blame for this. I am a happy iPhone customer, but I cannot deny that I don't really appreciate some of their hardware design choices. Very slippery, so the very first thing I do is put it in a case. So it doesn't matter if it's elegant and beautiful, it's in a TPU case so I don't drop it. Last time I had an iPhone that I didn't use a case for was the 4S. I still think that may have been peak iPhone in some ways. I have a 13 Pro Max coming Monday, and guess what, sitting on my desk in front of me is the case it will go into immediately after I take it out of the package. Kinda sad. Someone said they're not as slippery as the older phones, but have sharp edges. Okay on something the size of a 4S, not so okay on something the size of a small tablet.
- emerongi 5y agoI've been using my SE for 5 years now without a case nor a screen protector. The screen is fine, although the corners are a bit dinged from having been dropped and the back is quite scratched. Works fine, hoping to go another couple of years with it.
- alpaca128 5y agoOr, in my case, they could just make the back of the phone less smooth than a space telescope mirror so it doesn't slide off a flat table surface over the course of 20 minutes. But it looks really great in the marketing renders, so that's nice I guess.
- cannaceo 5y agoWhen Google did this with the Nexus 4 I broke three of them in one week while I waited for a case to arrive.
- bamboozled 5y agoAlso, let's have brands make the back stronger so they stop breaking? Some how the screen of my phone seems to be stronger than the back, which is shattered into a thousand pieces.
- 323 5y agoFor a number of years I had read how each generation of Gorrila Glass is 50% or something stronger, yet I was still experiencing broken phones. So I did a deep dive, long story short, when Gorilla Glass makes a stronger glass, the phone makers make the screen thinner, so we are back to square one.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoWhat's better? Thinner phones or stronger screens?
- christophilus 5y agoStronger screens.
- 8organicbits 5y agoScreens that are not cracked, whatever the needed strength and thickness may be.
- R0b0t1 5y agoThe very marginal increase in thinness is pointless. They should be going with unbreakable screens.
- rdtwo 5y agoCheaper
- GekkePrutser 5y agoDon't forget there's an incentive for manufacturers to make sure phones don't last forever..
- Grakel 5y agoSufficient thinness was reached like ten years ago. Imagine the battery life we could have.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
- dzhiurgis 5y agoI consider last couple of iPhone screens unbreakable, but they scratch at a whiff of a wind. 1 week of use and it’s already badly scratched. Not really visible with normal use tho.
- Godel_unicode 5y agoHow is that possible? I've never used a screen protector, never used a case, and the only screen-related problem I've had was when someone else knocked my phone out of my hand. Do you live in a rock tumbler...?
- Gigachad 5y agoDepends on your tolerance for scratches. All modern screens get these micro scratches which are visible with the screen off in the light, but go away with the screen on. Those scratches show up within days of perfectly normal use but the majority of people don’t even notice or care.
- Godel_unicode 5y agoPerhaps they do to you, but my highly scientific pole of 4 people I know who just carry their phones around sans case says this isn't a thing.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoPut your phone with airpods or something similar (I don't own any keys) and it instantly scratches. It's not awful - but scratches are there.
- crossroadsguy 5y agoWhy is it so difficult to even entertain the idea that phone makers want the screen, and now the back of the phone as well, to keep breaking? They want customers to keep paying to repair those screens and backs and keep buying new phones more often.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- causi 5y agoFor me the resistance to breaking and scratching is more than sufficient and has been for a while. As someone who grew up using PDAs with plastic resistive screens, I haven't scratched a phone screen since 2011, let alone broken one. What I want is folding screens with good scratch resistance.
- CryptoPunk 5y agohttps://archive.md/8ftkB https://archive.md/8ftkB
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- screenbreakout 5y agoI was always hoping we'd get to using liquid lense and screen you can roll up https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrowetting#:~:text=Electrowetting%20is%20the%20modification%20of,with%20an%20applied%20electric%20field https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrowetting#:~:text=Elect.... https://www.flexenable.com/technology/flexible-olcd/ https://www.flexenable.com/technology/flexible-olcd/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266081727_Electrowetting_on_liquid-infused_film_EWOLF_Complete_reversibility_and_controlled_droplet_oscillation_suppression_for_fast_optical_imaging https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266081727_Electrowe...