The Galaxy Note 7 was officially announced earlier this month at Samsung’s ‘Unpacked’ event in New York City. The device comes with a number of interesting new features and enhancements over its previous-generation model, the Galaxy Note 5. One of those new features happens to be the Gorilla Glass 5 protection not just for its 5.7-inch QHD Super AMOLED display, but also for the glass panel on the phone’s back. The handset is the first mainstream device to come with the new toughened glass technology from Corning, so obviously, people have been wondering whether all of that is just marketing jargon, or if the new-generation Gorilla Glass does indeed bring something more to the table when compared to its previous iterations.
Of course, there is only one way to find out exactly how tough the front and rear glass panels are, and that’s to perform the dreaded drop-test. That’s exactly what YouTube user XeeTechCare did, dropping the phone multiple times on a hard surface from a height of around five feet, before uploading the video online. In the video, which is embedded below, the phone is dropped not once, not twice, but as many as three times, without causing too many issues to its functionality. Even after the third drop, the device apparently continued to work just fine, and apart from a few cracks on the back panel and a few scratches here and there, the phablet got out of its ordeal mostly unscathed.
While the brand new phone was dropped face-first only once, the fact that it didn’t just survive the harrowing experience but came out of it with flying colors, is a testament to how much toughened glass technology has improved over the past few years. Meanwhile, it’s not just Corning that’s trying to come up with newer solutions to make smartphone displays safe. With demand steadily rising for tough and rugged devices that can withstand rough handling, Motorola last year launched what it described as the best solution for the frequent screen breakages that arise from dropping smartphones on hard surfaces. The ‘ShatterShield Display’ was one of the headline features for Motorola’s Droid Turbo 2.