14 DAY TRIAL // There are already plenty of smartwatches, smart bracelets, smartbands and other gadgets that can be worn on your body one way or another, but very few of them can boast of being able to bend, and those that do can't do it well. Not as well as what Samsung just allowed.
It might sound strange to those not versed in hardware, but printed circuit boards (PCBs), the main foundation of all electronic devices, are among the easiest to be rendered flexible.
Just replace the metal substrate with some sort of plastic or flexible glass and voila! You can bend it and even roll it around your finger.
Just look at keyboards. Many have the circuits layered on transparent sheets of very thin plastic just barely thicker than a book page.
What's really hard to pull off is making everything else in a device just as flexible, especially batteries. Samsung did it though.
The flexible Samsung battery
It's not such a big deal to provide energy to a device when it barely uses any power. That's why normal watches make do with tiny, round batteries no larger than half your fingernail.
Complex devices like smartbands need more power though, and that means larger batteries. Samsung's new flexible battery is bigger than normal ones, but it's also really thin and capable of wrapping around your wrist.
We can definitely see it integrated into the strap of a gadget, even though that means it will eliminate the chance to replace it.
That will only matter to smartwatches though. Smartbands and smart bracelets are made of a single body anyway, for the most part.
The new battery can take a U shape, so it can't perfectly roll around your forearm, especially if you're a particularly skinny person. Nevertheless, this is just a prototype, so future models will surely do better here.
In the meantime, we can definitely see it in bendable smartphones and tablets, as well as high-tech toys and maybe robots. Depends on each designer’s ideas really.
The bendable electronics trend
Flexible gadgets have always been fun to write about, but they've been showing up more and more in practice over the past two years. Samsung itself even made a bendable TV, whose screen can curve inwards on command.
We'll make sure to report on any inventions that use the new, world's first truly flexible battery (that's what Samsung called it), as well as any future and improved iterations.