[HN Gopher] Unbreakable phone screens could be made with a new m...
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Unbreakable phone screens could be made with a new material
Author : prostoalex
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-12-18 03:47 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| davesque wrote:
| As much as people sometimes react negatively to stories like this
| (where some technology shows early promise in a research lab), I
| just now realized that I actually really like this kind of
| popular science reporting. It's concise, includes a few
| interesting tidbits of materials science, and overall conveys a
| sense of technological hope and optimism to the reader. Of
| course, we all know that technologies described in articles like
| this are often a long ways off from commercialization, if they
| ever achieve that at all. But I remember a time when OLED tech
| was described in the exact same way in the 2000s. Here's hoping
| that perovskite tech eventually amounts to something.
| questiondev wrote:
| thank you for bringing this up, it's one of those things that
| younger me did not understand, i see the pessimism surrounding
| new technology and i want to point out to doubters that it will
| take longer than they expect but it will come. like you
| mentioned oled.
|
| a lot goes into building and refining the production process
| but once it starts, oh baby pandora's box is open.
| kurthr wrote:
| I agree with your general feeling that new technologies need to
| be given a certain benefit of the doubt since by definition
| they are far from production... we literally don't know how or
| what they would be used for.
|
| However, in this case I have a little bit too much knowledge
| about the field and I have to say that it's "not even wrong"...
| it reads like gibberish. Yes perovskites can be used to
| generate nano-particles which generate light on amorphous glass
| substrates. But the need to use lead based materials, or glass
| substrates, the difficulty of manufacture or the low
| efficiency, and so on are not advantages. They are
| disadvantages.
|
| In summary this discovery takes us no closer to unbreakable
| phone screens for a multitude of reasons, but primarily because
| what breaks (cracks, shatters, scratches, yields) is the cover
| glass rather than for example the OLED display, which are now
| primarily made from/on flexible substrates anyway. It is
| solving some orthogonal set of problems that are not laid out
| in the article, and which I as an expert am unable determine
| after reading it without searching for the original source
| material.
| najqh wrote:
| I don't want unbreakable, I want... unscratchable.
| ggfgg wrote:
| I still don't get how people manage to fuck up their phones so
| badly. Last five iPhones I've had were sold on in mint
| condition.
|
| I go cycling, hiking, climbing, camping with the things in a
| cheap TPU case and no screen protector. They are my primary
| outdoor navigation device, my camera and are used for 4-6 hours
| a day solid. I also drop the things occasionally.
|
| Do people put their 1000 buck investment in a pocket full of
| old bolts, keys and sand paper?!? I just don't understand how
| you even scratch one.
| phkahler wrote:
| Unbreakable is an exaggeration. I want something that will not
| break when dropped from 4 to 5 feet onto irregualar concrete.
| Phone are pretty good, but mine is glass front and back and I
| dont wrap it in a case. Have dropped it a few times and got
| lucky. I just dont want to rely on that luck.
| Animats wrote:
| Unscratchable is available. There's glass with a sapphire
| layer. Sapphire glass is often used for checkout scanners. Home
| Depot uses it.
|
| Apple tried to use sapphire glass for phone screens around
| 2014, but only succeeded in driving their sapphire maker into
| bankruptcy.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > It also prevents lead ions, which are toxic, leaching out of
| the material. At the end of their lives, the screens would be
| recyclable.
|
| "Would be recyclable" and "will be recycled" are totally
| different things.
|
| I think this is a cool article, but I wish it wouldn't try to
| sweep the environmental and toxicity issues under the rug with
| statements like "would be recyclable".
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Doing the right thing is expensive in many different ways;
| time, money, opportunity, etc.
|
| Whenever a company exploits a process to squeeze out extra
| profit we all assume the newly externalized costs. All products
| should be recycled at the end of their life and the costs
| involved should be built into the price. Some states mandate a
| redeemable deposit for cans and bottles. Perhaps every the
| United States could craft a responsible recycling program that
| tacks an appropriate tax onto a product that reflects the cost
| of a recycling the worst 10% off products in a category. I
| gladly pay to safely dispose my household waste responsibly,
| why must I continue to pay for companies that cleverly escape
| bearing these costs? The harms have been exhaustively
| calculated and established. I'm sick of being terrorized by
| belligerent psychopaths that feel entitled to pollute and
| contaminate everything they set their insatiable eyes upon.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| What was wrong with the plastic screens a few phones had a few
| years ago? My wife had a Motorola from Verizon, some kind of
| droid, I don't recall the specific name (droid turbo 2, maybe?).
| It was basically a Verizon-specific version of the Moto X, but it
| had a plastic screen. We put a tempered glass screen protector
| over the top, and it was impossible to discern that the screen
| itself was plastic.
|
| Edit: Went back and found a review of that phone, and I guess
| reviewers hated it. The screen wasn't as bright because the
| AMOLED screen wasn't bonded directly to a glass front. Oh well.
| My wife liked it just fine.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Are they claiming new glass that is tougher than existing glass,
| or is this 'just' a way to embed very tough LEDs into glass? As
| long as there's still glass in front, then it doesn't really
| matter how tough the LEDs/LCDs are. We don't need those to be
| tougher, we need the glass to be tougher.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Archived here https://archive.md/8ftkB
| Datenstrom wrote:
| Challenge accepted
| sideshowb wrote:
| ...by my 4yo
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| This sounds like you've bought baby-proof bowls [0] for your
| kid and have unfortunately failed.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/wfWMs_0wd_g
| Choco31415 wrote:
| ...by the Hydraulic Press Channel.
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