Hasta La Gadget!

Despite the fact that Gorilla Glass is supposed to be extremely durable, I can speak from experience that it can still shatter quite easily. In fact, the only time I ever dropped my iPhone 4 – about 2 feet – it completely shattered the screen and I had to buy a new phone. As Corning continues to improve their impact resistance with Gorilla Glass 3, a startup has a different sort of screen protection in mind.

The engineers at Cambridge, England’s Evolutive Labs have come up with a screen protector called Rhino Shield, which is expected to offer impressive shatter-resistance properties. By combining multiple protective layers with unique properties, they claim to have developed an incredibly durable screen protector for smartphones.

By adding “impact dispersion” and “impact damping” layers to their screen protector, they’re able to add a tremendous amount of protection in front of your gadget’s precious glass screen. Incredibly, all of these layers combine to be just 0.029cm thick, and will not impact screen sensitivity to your touch. The screen protector is easily installed with the included applicator, and can be removed without leaving a sticky residue. That all sounds good, but the proof is in the pudding – and the Rhino Shield doesn’t disappoint in the demo video below:

Wow. That was impressive – especially the part where they drop the steel ball bearing onto the unprotected and protected sheet of Gorilla Glass.

The Rhino Shield is currently raising funds for production over on Kickstarter, where a pledge of £12 (~$19 USD) will get you one for many of the most popular touchscreen phones, including the iPhone 4/4S, iPhone 5, Galaxy SIII, Nexus 4, and HTC One X+. They’re also working on versions for the iPad Mini, Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, iPad and other tablets, with prices ranging from £16 to £20 (~25 to $31 USD). Delivery is expected to begin this April.

During Google’s earnings call today, Google executives made it clear that the acquisition of Motorola comes with quite a bit of baggage. More specifically, Google has “inherited a 12-18 month product pipeline” that Google CFO Patrick Pichette says the company is “still working through.” Yikes. More »

Alright kid, let’s blow this thing and go home… Check out this awesome X-Wing Fighter coffee table made from wood and glass. It looks stunning and it took Sean Regan and Aubrey Cohen 6 months to make it, carving it from a few hunks of wood.

I love how dimensional it is, because the top half and bottom half hold the glass between them. That makes it look pretty sweet and also keeps it sturdy. You can try to make one yourself if you want, but I doubt it will look half as good.

If you were to pay for it, at a cost of about $14 an hour, this would cost in the neighborhood of $60,500. You could probably buy a real X-Wing Fighter for that – at least a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

[via Ubergizmo]

Personally, I prefer speakers that are heard and not seen, but if you’re from the opposite school of thought – and you have deep pockets – you might want some of these ginormous glass speakers for your media room.

Let’s get this out of the way first – Perfect8′s Point MKII Evolution Speaker System retails for $115,000(USD). Yep, that’s a condo or a small house in some cities. But at PERFECT8 technologies, it buys you a pair of speakers and subwoofers.

The Point MKII Evolution speaker system comes packaged in a a thick glass enclosure, carefully engineered to eliminate any rattle or unwanted noise. Highs are powered by a air-motion transformer with powerful neodymium magnets, while the midrange is provided by a pair of 7″ Mg-Cones, and the low range is powered by a pair of long-stroke 10″ subwoofers with 22 pound magnets, located in the base of the cabinet. Frequency response for the system is rated at 16Hz to 26KHz, with a THD of less than 0.2% at 96dB SPL. Maximum long-term power output for the speakers is 200 watts, with a peak handling capacity of 1000 watts.

While I have no doubt that these sound incredible, if you just like them because they’re transparent, then you might want to just go for People People’s Transparent Speaker, which you can get for as little as $360(USD) – and you can still put your kids through college.

[via Home Crux via Design You Trust]

Okay, I made that part about gorillas up, but it’s easy to forget the usefulness of Gorilla Glass. A lot of the smartphones and tablet people use everyday are covered in this durable material. That’s one of the reasons that the screen on your phone won’t break if you drop inadvertently. Granted, it won’t protect your phone from any drops, but I’ve been quite happy at how scratch-resistant it is.

And while it’s not actually shatterproof, Gorilla Glass is far more durable than ordinary glass. Now, Corning has revealed that a new version, simply called Gorilla Glass 3. The new glass will be unveiled at CES 2013 and it’s supposed to be even more durable than the previous generation.

There are already many devices covered in Gorilla Glass 2, and I’m hopeful that most of the ones I use next year will be covered in Gorilla Glass 3, assuming that it really does make them less likely to crack and shatter.