Kyocera is looking for ways to make its line of tough phones even tougher. The Japanese company already makes devices that use any amount of rubber needed to keep their products working under the harshest of conditions, but… there’s always a way to make them even more rugged. For one thing, Kyocera phones come with Gorilla Glass screens which are used in many of regular phones sold today. Sapphire glass, on the other hand, is more durable but it also costs more money, hence it’s reserved for the world’s most expensive devices made by the likes of Vertu and Gresso.
Kyocera is now exploring ways to use this material in its mobile products. And according to CNET, the company is working on its very first smartphone with a sapphire glass as we speak.
On July 10, “Randy Katz” posted a video on YouTube showing a slab of Kyocera sapphire embedded in a smartphone-esque housing model being put through various torture tests. Compared to a piece of regular impact-resistant glass, the Kyocera sapphire glass sustained several hard scratches from a rock and remained almost intact after being dropped against a small pebble on the floor.
Kyocera representatives are unsurprisingly numb on the issue, and we’ll likely have to wait for the actual product launch to get all the missing details. In the meantime, we’re eager to know – would you pay a premium for a phone that uses sapphire crystal display rather than standard glass?