Nokia has announced its intentions towards graphene, hoping to bring the super thin, strong, lightweight carbon allotrope to the masses by getting involved in research into the super-substance.
Graphene has got the technology world all afluster, as it ticks all the nerd boxes for strength, thinness, low weight and – most excitingly – bendy.
Nokia is joining the Graphene Flagship program because it "believes that graphene is a future-changing material" and "to help bring this most-promising material to the real-world."
Graphene novel
It's not clear exactly what Nokia itself will be doing to help other than pumping money into the project, with nine other partners also on board, notably four Nobel laureates and a parliament of universities taking part.
And here's where we wax lyrical about graphene: graphene sounds science-fictionesquely brilliant, like the Superman of materials.
It's just one atom thick – one atom! – while simultaneously having a breaking strength 300 times greater than steel, making it the strongest material ever tested.
It's also light as a feather, super conductive and crazy-flexible, meaning we could see OLED displays or solar cells shaped to curl around columns or screens that we can roll up and hide away in a cupboard.
Nokia's excited because its involvement in the initiative means that it could have first dibs on the stuff, potentially bringing concepts like Nokia Morph coming to fruition.
"Imagine a phone that can be screwed up into your pocket, where the size restrictions of today don't apply," it says. Imagine, indeed.
Via Nokia Conversations and Gizmodo
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