Let’s face it, losing your phone is annoying, but nothing compares to the mixed feeling of despair and anger that hits when you crack your phone screen. These are both problems that could be eradicated in future thanks to innovative Chinese tech startup Moxi (pronounced mou-shi) who have unveiled plans to launch the first flexible smartphone on the mass market.
Images of the phone suggest that the device will be long and narrow when unfurled with a large battery at the bottom of the handset. Users will be able to wrap it round their wrists in a throwback to the good old days of snap bracelets, though perhaps with a bit less force.
Moxi is planning to ship 100,000 of the devices in China by the end of this year, making the company the first to offer a flexible smart phone to the general public. This is not the first time that a tech firm has experimented with flexible technology, after Samsung were reported to be trialling a flexible handset and researchers in Canada developed ReFlex, a device that allows you to fling Angry Birds and flick through ebook pages using the phone’s flex function.
The use of Graphene, a material one million times thinner than a human hair but three hundred times stronger than steel, is behind the recent advances in flexible smartphone technology. The handset will cost 5,000 Yuan (around £520), making it slightly cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Edge (£639) and the iPhone 6S Plus (£619).
It seems like you might be paying for little more than novelty if you’re planning to buy the first incarnation of the Moxi handset however. Instead of the full colour screen shown in the picture, the device will run a black and white E ink display similar to that Kindle that you bought in 2012 but haven’t charged since. Though E ink conserves battery life, it is notoriously slow to refresh images, so watching videos on the device will be pretty difficult.
Though there seems to be a long way to go for flexible smartphone technology, Moxi are leading the way with the bracelet-style device (and we can’t see the arm in trying).
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.