New Gorilla Glass will shrug off bacteria, reflections

Corning’s Gorilla Glass is already pretty cool stuff, but the company’s next-gen product is even more amazing. It’s going to make your next smartphone incredibly readable in the brightest daylight and keep your filthy fingers from slathering its touchscreen with bacteria.

The “hole” you see in the image above isn’t actually a hole. It’s a small, circular area of a piece of glass that’s been treated with Corning’s new anti-reflective coating. As you can see, the difference is night and day. Instead of seeing mostly what’s behind you (clouds), you’ll actually be able to see what you’re looking at (grass).

Just imagine being able to pull your smartphone out in full daylight and being able to read incoming text messages without cupping your hand over the screen or squinting at it like a near-sighted pirate.

It’s great that Gorilla Glass already makes many of our smartphones incredibly resistant to scratches, chips, and dings, but this new coating is a real game-changer. If you’re going to drop six or seven hundred bucks on a phone, you’d probably like to be able to use it all the time — even when the afternoon sun is beating down from above. Gorilla Glass 4 may very well make that a reality.

The fact that it will also keep your screen from becoming overrun by colonies of bacteria is a nice bonus, too, especially if you’re willing to let other people fondle your phone from time to time. You can’t always tell where someone’s hands have been — and you don’t always want to.

At least with Gorilla Glass 4′s anti-microbial properties you won’t have to worry about picking something up from the front of your phone. Let’s just hope the rest of the chassis is getting the same treatment.