Nicole Scott, Mobile Geeks:

Transparent display’s are com­ing and we are hardly able to con­trol our excite­ment that Taiwanese com­pany, Polytron Technologies, is work­ing to pro­duce a com­pletely trans­par­ent Smartphone. We went down to Taoyuan about 35 min from Taipei by the air­port to check out a pro­to­type of their trans­par­ent Smartphone.

By far the largest com­po­nent in a smart­phone, except for the dis­play, is the bat­tery. Take a look at iFixit’s iPhone 5 tear­down and you’ll see the bat­tery is enor­mous com­pared to the other com­po­nents inside. Unless the bat­tery itself becomes trans­par­ent a trans­par­ent smart­phone will remain sci­ence fiction.

But some sci­ence fic­tion does become real­ity, and trans­par­ent bat­ter­ies will even­tu­ally enable trans­par­ent smart­phones. In 2011 Stanford researches invented a trans­par­ent lithium-ion bat­tery. The ques­tion is a mat­ter of when, not if, a trans­par­ent bat­tery will become com­mer­cially avail­able and afford­able enough to power a trans­par­ent smartphone.