What’s better than a thin, light smartphone or tablet? An even thinner and lighter smartphone or tablet, of course. Corning is doing its part to bring that vision to life with the next generation of Gorilla Glass.

Corning unveiled Gorilla Glass 2.0 yesterday at CES 2012 in Las Vegas. The new glass is 20 percent thinner, but has the same scratch resistance and endurance as current Gorilla Glass.

Aside from making devices thinner and lighter, Gorilla Glass 2.0 brings some other benefits for mobile gadgets; a press release from Corning also touts "brighter images, and greater touch sensitivity.”

With thinner glass, device manufacturers can develop sleeker touchscreen gadgets like smartphones, tablets, and laptops--as seen with the coming explosion of ultrabooks. Microsoft is excited about the prospects of Gorilla Glass 2.0 for use in the broad range of devices it has planned for Windows 8 and for future iterations of Windows Phone.

Mobile devices that are designed to be used on the go need all the durability they can get. Once you leave the relative safety of your office or home and venture out into the world, the odds that you will drop, bang, ding, or scratch your gadgets increases exponentially.

Five years ago, the Apple iPhone launched the Gorilla Glass renaissance. There is some debate as to whether or not current iPhone models still use it or not. The Corning site lists devices that use Gorilla Glass, but states up front that there are non-disclosure agreements in place with some vendors that prohibit it from naming them. That sounds like something Apple would do. All I know is that I've dropped my iPhone 4S four times in the past week, and it doesn’t have a scratch.

Corning claims the super-strong glass is used in nearly 600 different products, and it expects 2011 revenue from Gorilla Glass to top $700 million.

For more blogs, stories, photos, and video from the nation's largest consumer electronics show, check out PCWorld's complete coverage of CES 2012.