Sapphire crystal for manufacturing protective elements in mass product first started Apple: iPhone 5 models in this material is used for the camera lens and Home buttons. In the future the iPhone sapphire may be the entire front panel.
LG, for example, also uses a sapphire crystal to protect the optics of the camera in some smartphones, while Samsung, ZTE, Huawei and Xiaomi ready to follow the example of their colleagues. It is expected that smartphones with sapphire elements start to appear in 2015.
It is noted that in smartphones sapphire (more precisely, a synthetic leucosapphire) is mainly used for the manufacture of safety glass chamber. The Taiwanese company Tera Xtal Technology, which delivers sapphire products , makes monthly 200 thousand sapphire ingots, 1 million of sapphire wafers and 100 thousand template substrates.