Even with foldable phones a reality, batteries have remained stubbornly solid. A new paper outlines a technique for replacing solid electrodes with toothpaste-like fluids. The resultant batteries aren’t just flexible, but can also be stretched. Smartphone manufacturers have pretty successfully proven by now that foldables phones are commercially viable. Granted, phones with screens that bend and flex may never be as durable as their flat, rigid brethren, but so long as you treat them with an appropriate amount of respect, they shouldn’t do you wrong. Many of us are already dreaming about what’s next, and whether or not we’ll ever see foldable-phone tech evolve into something even more flexible — literally and figuratively. Now a novel development in battery engineering gives us reason to be hopeful. Folding screens are no problem, and we’ve even seen displays that roll up like a scroll. But so far those concepts have paired rollable screens with rigid phone bodies. We can make displays flexible, sure, and even circuit boards can be printed on flexible material, but there’s been one major component getting in the way of building a phone where the entire handset body can bend: the battery.
