While you might not have heard of Corning directly, you will likely have used a device with their toughened glass on the front. Corning is a company that produces some of the best glass for smartphones, and in a new press release, it announced the upcoming release of its new Gorilla Glass Ceramic material.
As you can probably guess from the name, this new glass incorporates ceramic material into its composition. The aim is to help improve the overall durability of the phone compared to using just glass and plastic.
While Corning hasn’t specifically stated which model will have the new glass, it did say that it would first appear on a Motorola phone, releasing “in the coming months.” As such, a fair guess would be that we could see the new glass on the Motorola Razr 60 Ultra, also assumed to be called the Razr Plus 2025 in the U.S.
But how tough is this new material really? In the Corning lab, the material managed to survive 10 repeated one-meter drops onto 180-grit sandpaper, meant to replicate the abrasiveness of asphalt. An "alternative Aluminosilicate glass" failed after just one drop, although it's not made clear how failure was defined.
Are ceramic/glass mixes completely new?
This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen ceramics used in Corning products, as the Gorilla Armor 2 found in the Galaxy S25 series has the same ceramic material. This could be bad news, however, as when Allstate tested the Galaxy S25 Ultra with a 6-foot drop, the phone was found to be less durable than many would like, with the rear glass on the phone shattering on impact.
It should be noted that Apple has been using its own Ceramic Shield material since the iPhone 12. Apple also claimed that its material had been made 50% tougher for the iPhone 16 models; however, subsequent drop tests for the iPhone 16 Pro saw the phone stop working due, in part, to the thinner bezels.
The issue is that, while lab tests give you a good idea of how durable a phone can be, they’re not perfect. If you happen to drop your phone outside, there can be any number of factors that can contribute to your screen shattering that a lab simply cannot recreate.
As such, we would always recommend putting your phones in a suitable case to help keep them looking their best. We also have a guide for how to protect your new phone, as well as what steps you can take to keep your phone safe. But for situations where a case won't protect you, it sounds like having Gorilla Glass Ceramic on your device gives it the best chance it can have of surviving unscathed.
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