Linus Tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by nc.com your source for
great technology selection and service along with Corsair memory and Western
Digital welcome to the Corning Booth where we are going to be having my
lovely assistant show me just how dirty my phone is with is it sorry is it a TPA
meter at ATP meter all right so basically what this does is it looks for
any kind of organic material on the surface of the glass of my phone and
tells me not necessarily how much of it is dead or alive but simply how much
there is and I mean at a show like Vegas it's probably safe to say that some of
it's alive and some of it is going to get me sick cuz I can already feel a
cold coming on anyway so I'll let you go ahead and start swabbing the phone while
we talk a little bit about the technology that is in corning's gorilla
glass with antimicrobial agent now this watch right here in the top left has
regular soda lime glass which is an inexpensive alternative to Gorilla Glass
then in the bottom left we see what happens to that glass if you add as much
antimicrobial agent as they did to their own glass it turns yellow which is
undesirable from pretty much any perspective in the middle we've got
corny and gorilla glass at the top for reference and then at the bottom with an
antimicrobial film now this might be effective but unfortunately it gives a
very hazy appearance to whatever's behind it in the top right we've got
regular well not regular it's awesome regular Corning Gorilla Glass again and
then on the bottom we've got that same glass with their antimicrobial agent and
it is just as transparent and strong and flexible and all those great things as B
before so something a lot of people don't think about so we're just having
the the test completed over here is that is that their phone touches not only
their hands but also their face and all kinds of crazy things you lend it to
someone so it can be a um well I guess
we'll find out basically that chart behind us is a summary of the people
here at the show who have had their phones tested here at the booth so they
we've had levels of ATP as low as kind of 11 to 30 and levels as high as
Apparently one lady licked her phone and got a reading over 2,000 not something
Corning or really anyone recommends but there you have it guys that's how uh
that's how some people want to be about it so here we go guys let's find out
just how dirty my phone is the ATP once the ATP meter finishes
booting up guys we're not going to cut this cuz we want you to know that you know this is you know how how dirty or
not dirty I happen to be in the meantime let's talk about what the antimicrobial
agent actually does so we had to cut this here guys because we got to be very
careful what we say this is the world world 's first EPA approved
antimicrobial glass but that you know there are certain words we can't use but
what we can say is you can be comforted to know that over the duration of the
lifetime of your device whether you have a high rating or a low rating you can be
comforted to know that the antimicrobial agent is always working Thunderbolt 2 my
friends available on the Mac Pro actually available on some PC stuff as
well is a very very versatile standard
now it's 20 gbit per second which means you can connect all all kinds of great
stuff including you know u high definition or even greater than high
definition cameras capture devices external PCI Express enclosures and all
kinds of crazy stuff like that but one of the limitations of Thunderbolt right
now is that particularly with the copper cables available on the market distance
is a problem so if you're setting up something like a little Mac Pro Studio
workspace the 3 M maximum distance you can be away from the back of the PC with
a copper cable might not be enough to have an efficient workplace so Corning
with their expertise when it comes to materials is releasing Optical
Thunderbolt cables that are capable of much much thinner form factors as well
as much longer distances they have a 10 m cable now there's a 30 m cable coming
very soon that's correct okay and then they're going to have up to a 60 M cable
coming later this year now you probably know you know or you've heard somewhere
that optimal optical cables can be very fragile don't worry about that guys
they've got a demo here where they're taking their optical cable jamming it
into tiny little holes tying it into knots they've got a laser pointer on the
one end and you can see that on aside from the optical signal still passing
through there is no leakage at any of those knots so it has still maintains
its Integrity if it gets closed in a drawer closed in a door closed in a okay
I'm I'm not going to say any other words that rhyme with that the point is that
it will maintain its data Integrity pretty much regardless of what happens to it but that's not all guys
Thunderbolt needs longer distance and thinner cables but so does USB 3 now to
be clear this right here is not corning's product okay this is actually
a copper based active usb3 extension cable it's a 15m cable it's extremely
heavy made of copper and also very bulky
for comparison my friends this is corning's usb3 compatible to be clear
guys the USB 3 standard doesn't include anything about optical cables so they
were kind of like well okay we're big company we can like engineer a solution
here even though it's not in the spec so Corning is releasing their Optical us be
three compatible cables in lengths up to 50 m and we can be expecting those later
on in the year you can see they're obviously thinner obviously lighter and
of course they're Optical so performance is going to be obviously better thank
you well okay to be clear guys it'll still be 5 gbit per second or 10 GB per
second or whatever USB 3 ends up becoming but better in terms of you know
not having signal degradation over length which is why the copper one is so
bulky there there I clarified that anyway guys don't miss any of our CES
203 2014 coverage our trip to the show
this year is powered by nc.com your source for great technology selection
and Service as well as Corsair memory and Western Digital a huge thanks to
those guys because without them we wouldn't be able to be here