For the longest time, I have been waiting for someone to come up with some sort of ‘rhino lining’ for mobiles. Well, it looks as if someone has heeded my call. According to the NewScientist.com, TDK is coming to the rescue with a new scratch resistant coating.

Hey, if this stuff will protect my mobile phone from my day-to-day abuses, then I am all for it. Don’t get me wrong, I think this could be awesome for CDs as well, but to be honest my real concerns are for my mobile. Plain and simple, folks.

The colour LCD screens on cellphones and PDAs can get badly scratched in pockets stuffed with loose change and keys. And CDs and DVDs become unplayable in no time when children use them as indoor frisbees. Now a tough, transparent polymer coating developed by chemists in Japan is set to make scratched phone screens and scuffed discs a thing of the past.

In one of the most convincing technology demonstrations this reporter has witnessed, I was handed a CD, a wire-wool pan scourer and some permanent marker pens, and invited to scratch or mark the discs. Hard as I tried, I could not make a single mark on the disc with the scourer. And the ink simply wiped off.