Glass metal for future iphone case?

[tigress666]

Hey, check this article out:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110512150815.htm

Says the glass is stronger than steel or titanium and that before it's been expensive to mold but apparently some scientists at Caltech have figured out a way to make the process the same as how you mold plastic (so much more in the likelyhood to use it for stuff like cellphones as the price wouldn't be prohibitive).

 

[Gav2k]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

Very cool!

 

[NutsNGum]

That is pretty crazy.

 

[jmann]

Wow, that is amazing. I do hope they incorporate this into a future iPhone, if it's appropriate. They would probably have to paint it, or leave it the default color though.

 

[binaryblob]

I wonder if it melts as easily as some plastic...

 

[tigress666]

I wonder if it melts as easily as some plastic...

I doubt it, have you read the article? One of the problems with it is that if you heat it to the temps of plastic, it will crystalize so quick you can't do anything with it (I think what they discovered is a way to heat it quickly enough it uniformly gets heated so they have a good enough instance they can mold it). So old way was to heat it really super high to mold it (which was higher than the molds could really stand so you had to replace molds a lot).

So I am thinking if you put it on something hot most likely it will crystalize so quickly it won't even make much of a dent if at all.