Will cracked screens actually become a thing of the past this decade? We’re definitely on an impressive trajectory! Just two years after Samsung’s Galaxy S23 adopted a new Corning Gorilla Glass that can survive waist-high drops of one meter directly onto concrete, the new Samsung S25 Ultra has a ceramic version that can apparently survive head-high drops of 2.2 meters (7.2 feet).
It’s called Corning Gorilla Armor 2, and you should know that neither Samsung nor Corning is promising that your actual phone will survive such a drop — if it’s anything like the 2023 claim, the 2.2-meter drop is simply what a phone-sized, weighted “puck” was able to survive when dropped face down in the lab. All Samsung said onstage today is that the material is better able to resist damage.
But that’s still over twice the height Corning and Samsung touted two generations ago, and the company impressively claims it was able to achieve that without compromising the scratch resistance of the glass — something that Corning has occasionally had to compromise in the past, as developing new forms of glass can come with tradeoffs between different kinds of protection. The new Armor 2 apparently has the same scratch protection as before, with “over four times more scratch resistance than competitive lithium-aluminosilicate cover glasses with an anti-reflective coating,” according to the companies.
And Corning and Samsung say the glass will still “dramatically” cut down on reflections like last year’s Gorilla Armor, a claim we found held up in our Samsung phone testing.
But, like last year, Samsung’s only promising to offer the best glass on its high-end Ultra model, which starts at $1,299, and it’s important to remember that any number of factors can cause a glass screen to crack sooner than you might like. If it lands on a slightly pointier protrusion than tested in the lab, or if the glass has already been slightly scratched, it could break when dropped from a lower height.
Corning has also provided a form of ceramic glass to Apple for its iPhones since 2020 — it calls that product “Ceramic Shield.”
