Graphene flexibility in your smartphone

Strange ideas

Check out the weird vision of future smartphones in this Samsung concept ad.  I can't really imagine why I'd want a smartphone arranged like this but I do appreciate the wealth of opportunities that a flexible device could open up.

Current screen technology is rigid, primarily because the materials used in the construction are brittle and need to be kept straight to avoid damage.  Modern touchscreens use Indium tin oxide to provide that conductive electrical layer we control with our swipes, taps and flicks.  Indium is rare, expensive and very brittle so hardly an ideal material to build an industry on.

Too precious for touchscreens

What if there was a material that was electrically conductive, cheap to produce, abundant and flexible to replace Indium.  Sounds unlikely or we would already be using it.  Well, that wonder material is just around the corner and thanks to the truckloads of investment from the likes of Samsung, that game changing technology could be just around the corner.

Yes, the material, the answer to so many of our technology woes, is graphene.  Graphene seems to tick all the boxes . . .

• It's really just very thin graphite - we are not going to run out of graphite

  

  Wonderful graphene

• Manufacturing graphene will become cheap and very reliable - it's a natural product, scraped thin to just one atom thick
• It's transparent (because it's so thin)
• It's strong (the strongest material we have on earth)
• It's highly conductive - ideal for small electrical impulses

Can we even begin to comprehend where a material with such mind-boggling properties will take us?

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130306-bend-and-flex-for-mobile-phones