Engineers and scientists working on spray-on batteries and T-shirts that allow you to charge your mobile devices

Smartphones (and handheld consoles) in this day and age are amazing. They can be used to play games, browse the web for recipes, pump out killer beats, and walk your dog when you can't be bothered getting out of bed. Probably.

What isn't amazing, however, is their ruddy battery life, which is often a little underwhelming, to say the least.

Thankfully, website Boy Genius Report has published two articles about new forms of battery tech that could - hopefully - one day solve our smartphone juice problems.

The first of these is a normal store-bought T-shirt soaked in a fluoride solution and baked at a high temperature in an oxygen-free oven.

"We wear fabric every day," Xiaodong Li, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of South Carolina, said. "One day our cotton T-shirts could have more functions; for example, a flexible energy storage device that could charge your cell phone or your iPad."

"We will soon see roll-up cell phones and laptop computers on the market. But a flexible energy storage device is needed to make this possible."

Spray it

The second piece of exciting new battery tech is a spray-on battery, discovered by scientists from Rice University in Houston and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, which can be deployed via an aerosol can.

Basically, this tech could potentially transform any surface into an energy storage device. The technology could even lead to paint-on solar cells, which would be rather handy.