Blonde signed up to attend the Women In Travel Summit 2015 in Boston in late March. Boston in March??? The same year it got over 100 inches of snow?
Well, I signed up a good 6 months before then and didn’t know there was going to be Snowmageddon. Besides, Boston was my home for 17 years so it seemed like a good idea. And oddly enough, it was!
One of the sponsors of the conference was Corning® Gorilla® Glass. I thought it would be interesting to meet with them and see why they like to use ® so often.
OK, that isn’t true. I thought they would give me some casserole dishes.
That isn’t true either. I had no clue who they were, when gorillas started needing glasses, if these were stemware or eyeglasses and what it had to with women and travel.
So I chatted with some of the women from Corning about Gorilla Glass 4 and found out it has a lot to do with travel and, serendipitously, this particular traveler.
There is a blonde trail of tears over the years of broken phones, cameras, laptops, anything and everything that contains glass.
I broke a screen dropping a phone down the stairs here
And here’s where I dropped a portable GPS device (remember those) and rendered it directionless. (Actually it was worse than directionless. It screamed “turn left” constantly as Brunette drove nervously enough through a 14 mile mountain tunnel. The GPS had gone mad and was actively trying to kill us.)
While I was off breaking things, Corning was developing its toughest cover glass yet for the very sorts of devices I was sending on unplanned trips down marble stairs, windowsills, the tops of rental cars and even into the Gulf of Mexico. (To my knowledge Corning doesn’t yet have anything that can make phones swim but I’ll hope they alert me if they come up with something like that.)
So when Corning asked if I would write a sponsored blog post telling my readers about Gorilla Glass 4, I said I would.
I wanted to know a little more about the story behind the glass and asked to interview one of the scientists who had worked on developing the product. Not because I know the slightest thing about glass science, but because I thought it might be interesting and it was.
I spoke with Lisa Noni, a Senior Development Scientist at Corning Incorporated.
Lisa was the kind of child who always wanted to put broken things back together and figure out why they broke. (Apparently clumsy blondes weren’t the reason where she grew up. It was quite obvious in our household.)
Fast-forward and Lisa became a surface chemist working with glass, specifically figuring out how it broke. She’s a type of glass forensics scientist called a fractographer. How cool is that?
In our conversation, Lisa explained that Corning gets feedback from consumers who have experienced broken devices and from the manufacturers who use Corning glass in their products. And Corning listens and works to improve their products! (Hey airlines, are you listening? This is a really good idea!)
So why do you care? Because if you’ve experienced the sinking feeling that comes with a shattered screen, you can now do something to help keep that from happening to you in the future.
Gorilla Glass 4 is Corning’s toughest cover glass yet. Lisa and others perform tests where they try to destroy it by sandblasting it and dropping it in scientific ways. I learned that with traditional glass, even when it survives a fall, it loses strength and becomes vulnerable to future damage from even less force. So Corning focused not only on not breaking the glass, but also on retaining its strength. (In “Blonde,” this means the next time you’re clumsy, you’ll probably be OK the next, next time.)
Any fellow traveler knows the pain of suddenly being without a beloved phone or other device while traveling. I’ve mulled spending a day standing in line in retail stores in Barcelona, resorted to buying disposable digital cameras, and endured other hassles and downtime, not to mention the additional unplanned expenses. None of these inconveniences have made me a more enjoyable travel companion!
If you’re considering getting a new phone or tablet go here and check first to be sure it has Gorilla Glass 4. More than 3 billion devices and 40 brands use Gorilla Glass so you shouldn’t have trouble getting a phone, notebook or tablet that meets your needs and has it. Find out if your device has Gorilla Glass here.
If the device does have Gorilla Glass 4 it will:
- Perform up to 2X better than competitive glass designs in devices dropped from 3 feet high.
- Have a lot more damage resistance against sharp contact such as a drop on asphalt (that poor GPS device in Croatia’s undoing), concrete and other rough surfaces
- Be thin and lightweight so there isn’t any downside to the increased protection.
- Come with a whole lot of ®s.
If the device doesn’t have Gorilla Glass 4, buy one that does. Don’t make life more complicated than it already is!
Disclosure: I received compensation for writing this review.