Your next Samsung phone could scoff in the face of concrete drops

Your next phone could be getting a major screen upgrade. Corning’s newly announced Gorilla Glass Victus 2 has improved durability and is heading to new smartphones sometime in the next few months. Most importantly, the glass is specifically designed to handle damage from hard, rough surfaces like concrete and asphalt.

As a sequel to the previous Victus glass, used on phones like the Galaxy Z Flip 3 and this year’s Pixel 7 Pro, Victus 2 is equally capable at scratch resistance as it is surviving drops, and there’s a good chance it’s a preview of the kind of durability we can expect to see on Samsung’s yet-to-be-announced Galaxy S23.

Big Drops — Under test conditions, a phone with Victus 2 could survive a one-meter drop on simulated concrete with few easily noticeable scratches or fractures — something a phone with “competitive aluminosilicate glasses” struggled to do at less than a meter, Corning claims.

That gets boosted to two meters (around face- or selfie-height) on simulated asphalt, all without losing the general scratch resistance of the previous Victus. That’s been the major success of Corning’s Victus line in general. Where previously, making improvements to drop resistances could hurt scratch resistance, Victus and now Victus 2 strike a good balance between both.

Corning doesn’t share specifics on how it makes its new glass but does say that Victus 2 uses a new glass composition that considers the trend towards larger and heavier phones and the places where drops will be most damaging.

The durability of phones has naturally improved over the years — you’re less likely to shatter a phone dropping it from your bed — and now you’re more likely to destroy your screen on the rougher pavement outside than anything you can do at home. Victus 2 is an attempt to compensate for that. And likely a component we’ll see a whole lot more of in 2023.