Ceramic is making increasing appearances in modern consumer technology. Asus has its Ceraluminium-bodied notebooks, Apple has its Ceramic Shield glass, and now Corning, the company responsible for Apple’s displays, has Gorilla Glass Ceramic on the way for Android devices.

The role of technological glass development is one of the most underappreciated aspects of mobile technology. It has the twin drawbacks of being invisible (you literally look through it), and it doesn’t make a beeping noise. It just sits there, quietly, protecting your phone’s innards. Soon, it’ll provide more protection to more users.

Ceramic strength

Corning reckons that its new grade of glass, which offers “[i]deal protective cover material for the front and back of electronic displays”, can survive multiple metre-high drops onto an asphalt surface. Technically, it’ll shrug off up to ten drops onto “surfaces replicating asphalt”, but that probably includes concrete and anything softer than that.

The revamped displays also display “high resistance to sharp contact damage”, letting the screens avoid cracks from corners and keys longer. It’s not quite Gorilla Glass Armor, the anti-reflective glass Samsung uses for its headline devices, but it could be comparatively as strong.

It’ll also turn up this year, first in an unnamed Motorola smartphone but we can expect it to see broader use throughout the industry shortly afterward. If you’re not keen on waiting, you can check out all of the technical details of Corning’s new Gorilla Glass Ceramic here (PDF).