The company has filed for a patent

Jan 23, 2007 15:13 GMT  ·  By

The cases of most mobile phones can very easily get scratched or dirty if their user doesn't pay enough attention, which is very inconvenient because sometimes that's just the last thing you'd want to worry about. Nokia wants to put an end to all this and has been experimenting with plastic casings coated with a diamond-like material from coa.

First off, the material is pretty cheap, therefore it can be easily used without high additional costs. The material is also more protective and grime resistant as well as bio-degradable, which means that when the user doesn't want the phone anymore, he/she can simply throw it away knowing that the thin layer of coal will degrade naturally.

Even cheap plastics can be coated this way due to the fact that the process works at room temperature. In order to make the material, electric current is fed through coal graphite, thus creating plasma which is directed towards a plastic casing by high-voltage electrodes.

The coal ions penetrate the surface and bond to form an amorphous, less than 100 nanometers thick diamond-like coating. Although the coating is very tough, ensuring that your mobile phone will not be severely damaged, it is also very smooth to the touch. Because of the fact that it's anti static it will not attract dirt easily either.

While mobile phone cases have been coated before, it was generally for improving their appearance and aside from its functionality, the surface of a mobile phone's 'diamond-coated' case will reflect and diffract light in a similar way to shiny metal, which basically means it won't look bad either. Nokia has filed for a patent but there's no way to tell when we'll start seeing the 'Diamond'-coated mobile phones.