The Galaxy Note 7 is the first phone with Gorilla Glass 5

Just a few weeks after announcing the technology, Corning's latest Gorilla Glass 5 will make its retail debut on the brand new Galaxy Note 7. Gorilla Glass 5 takes all of the strength and clarity of the previous version and adds a major boost to the strength of the glass when it comes to breaking on impact from drops.

Extra drop protection on Samsung's latest Note

Without compromising any other features of the well-known screen glass, Corning claims that Gorilla Glass 5 can take drops from five feet off the ground onto "hard, rough surfaces" with an 80% survival rate. That's substantially better than competitive glass coverings, and of course an improvement over Gorilla Glass 4 that you'll find on the Galaxy Note 5.

What's particularly important about this upgrade is that the Note 7 uses Gorilla Glass 5 on the back of the phone as well, which is the side most likely to take daily abuse and harder impacts.

Now naturally that's not a "shatterproof" kind of claim like we've seen from some synthetic sapphire screens, but it's starting to approach that range of reliability. Knowing that your phone's screen glass is extra strong is more of a peace of mind sort of thing than an actually insurance plan against dropping your phone ... but we all know drops will happen — let's just hope that if you drop your Note 7, Gorilla Glass 5 will come to its rescue.

Andrew Martonik

Andrew was an Executive Editor, U.S. at Android Central between 2012 and 2020.