Dragontrail vs. Gorilla: The Super Tough Glass Game Is On [Video]

The touchscreen mobile device business is getting tougher-in more ways than one. Japan’s Asahi glass has a new super-tough material called Dragontrail that’s aiming to be better and stronger than Gorilla Glass.

Ashai is Japan’s biggest glassmaker, and it just launched the recent Dragontrail material with an even amount of pomp and circumstance in Japan. The glass is claimed to be six times stronger than conventional glass, stronger than typical window soda-lime glass and has a ” beautiful, pristine finish,” in line with press materials. It will possibly directly resist scratches (reporters at the event invited to aim to wreck a sample with a key) and a small, millimeter-thin sample can withstand 60 kilos of weight by bending before breaking. Investigate cross-check the demonstration video below:

Asahi is basically confident in its product, and expects it to earn well over $350 million of revenue when it’s settled into the market in 2012. Ultimately, it hopes to capture up to 30% of its market.

This is not any small sum, however it’s dwarfed by some expectations for Asahi’s big competitor, Corning, with its similar Gorilla glass material, a stressed alkali-aluminosilicate glass that’s used on the iPhone and other high-profile devices. Gorilla’s 2011 revenues may reach $1 billion.

One big factor driving this new market are the ever-increasing number of portable gadgets we own. Not only can we now carry more digital electronics around with us, but because of innovations like the iPhone these gizmos are sporting larger and bigger screens-making them more at risk of damage by accidental drops or the display-wrecking effects of a scratch due to sliding a phone into a pocket filled with urban detritus. Toughened safety glass that also possesses high optical quality (needed for today’s tablet PCs and smartphones) can prevent a variety of this damage.

It also allows bold design decisions to be tried out: like Apple’s iPhone 4, which relies on glass for some of its structural rigidity, and the thinness of the cruel glass to bring the LCD towards the user’s finger for a more satisfying touchscreen experience. We also suspect that new super-strong, glass-like materials may sooner or later be used to make devices in their entirety.

Two interesting unwanted effects to all this: the glass industry gets a jolt and our future gadgets can be more damage-proof and are available in increasingly innovative shapes.

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This post is tagged: conventional glass, design decisions, digital electronics, optical quality, pomp and circumstance, soda lime glass