Samsung has a stake in Corning, the makers of the tough Gorilla Glass material that most modern flagships use to prevent them from shattering into pieces when they hit the ground. Thus, it's only logical that one of its famed phone lines - the Note phablets with S Pen stylus - is usually where every new generation of Gorilla Glass makes a cameo. Thus, when Corning invited us to observe their R&D factory process not long ago, we assumed that the newly-minted Gorilla Glass 6 we saw there will debut on the Note 9.

Corning, however, sent us a memo that the first phone with Gorilla Glass 6 will be from Oppo, and indeed it was the R17 and its Pro version that got announced bearing the latest Corning creation that protects against even higher and more frequent drops than Gorilla Glass 5 that wraps the Note 9.

We were a bit disappointed, but nothing beats a good old machine-dropped test of the Note's durability, and you can see how it fares against the iPhone X that also carries a reinforced glass body. We won't spoil the fun, but we'll just say that both phones held up pretty well for $999 glass-y handsets... until they didn't.