Motorola builds a “shatterproof” phone for a less fragile world

Sick of seeing broken phones everywhere you go? Motorola is as well, and has come up with a phone it says has a screen that won’t break when you drop it.

Watch people handle mobile phones in the real world and it’s pretty clear that the once fragile mobile phone is something we no longer treat with the same care. In fact, these days it’s more normal to expect a phone to replace its screen a year or two into its life because of how often people drop them.

You still shouldn’t drop them, that said, but if you do, mobile phone repair places can at least help you out in a heartbeat, with a cost of around $100 to $300 usually saving you from buying a new phone.

But what if you just want mobile phones to be made better, to be produced with screens that won’t shatter when they eventually or inadvertently fall to the ground?

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Motorola’s answer for this is to develop a screen that should fare better thanks to how it has been put together.

Called “ShatterShield”, it’s a Motorola concept comprised of five layers, with an aluminium chassis along the inside of the phone, followed by the display itself, a secondary touch layer in case the one in the phone breaks down, a layer of glass, followed by a second layer with a proprietary coating that is supposed to protect against dents.

The result is a screen that shouldn’t be damaged too much if it falls on the hard surface, and Motorola has even produced a video on the product, which you can see below.

Beyond the super hard display, you’ll find a 5.4 inch AMOLED screen running the Quad HD resolution of 2560×1440, which is the same as what’s found in Motorola’s other flagship, the X Style.

There are actually two other flagships from Motorola this year, with the recently reviewed X Play making up for its slightly low-end specs with a big battery, while the X Style (which we should have a review for shortly) is larger and more about being a stylish phablet-based device.

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Inside the X Force, it’s similar to what the Style offers, with a Snapdragon 810 eight-core processor, 3GB RAM, up to 64GB storage, a microSD card slot, and support for 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1 LE, with the same 21 megapixel rear camera.

But on the outside, it’s about being highly drop resistant, all the while offering a large 3760mAh battery, which should boast at least a day of life, and probably closer to two based on what we saw with the X Play.

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Locally, Motorola isn’t saying anything about its X Force phone, except to say that we should expect it in “APAC” — that’s us, by the way — in November, but we have started nudging the reps in the country, so the moment any start talking, you’ll get a quote here.