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How To Scratch a Sapphire Smartphone Screen

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It's one of the top buzzwords of the year in mobile technology: the sapphire screen. More appropriately called a sapphire crystal display, its remarkability lies not in clarity or resolution or thumb-feel ... but in saving us from our oafish, clumsy-handed selves.

Sapphire crystal is hard, see – harder than anything on the good 'ole Mohs hardness scale except diamond (as we discussed in a piece last year on why sapphire is awesome). And since we don't generally carry diamonds in our pockets on the regular, the thinking goes that a sapphire screen would be harder than anything that could potentially scratch it - such as the quartz of beach sand, avowed nemesis of glass smartphone displays everywhere.

It's thinking like this which led GT Advanced Technologies to acquire the sapphire production facility we toured last year, thinking like this which has fueled endless speculation about just why Apple recently bought a sapphire production facility of its very own. But the first sapphire screen-packing smartphone to arrive in our review labs comes not from Apple but from Kyocera, and it comes with sapphire crystal not from GT Crystal Systems, but from Kyocera itself.

It's the Kyocera Brigadier, a rugged smartphone for Verizon Wireless featuring MIL-STD 810G and IP68 durability, a Snapdragon 400 processor backed up by 2GB of RAM, and a 4.5" 720p display protected by a single sheet of Kyocera's very own synthetic sapphire crystal.

The company was so confident about its scratch-resistant display protection that it even sent along a testing kit with the Brigadier –a smartphone torture set of sorts– containing everything from steel wool to coins to knives to honest-to-God rocks, all of it begging ... no, daring us to test it.

And test it we did.

Did we manage to scratch the very first sapphire screen we've ever laid hands on? You bet we did – but while you might be disappointed to learn that it took no diamonds to accomplish that feat, you'll be glad (or at least entertained) to see just how much grief we had to give the Brigadier to earn those scratches.

Join us, then, for our Kyocera Brigadier torture test. And if you want a refresher on just how synthetic sapphire screens come into being, check out our GT Crystal Systems tour, available on our channel page. Enjoy!

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