Costly smartphone screen breakages could soon be a thing of the past after British scientists invented a cheap flexible touchscreen made of silver and graphene.

Current screens are so brittle because they are made of indium tin oxide and covered with glass, which can shatter easily when dropped.

Not only is indium tin oxide fragile, it is also difficult to extract from the ground, making touchscreens expensive to repair.

But now scientists at the University of Sussex have found it is possible to combine graphene - a material made from a single layer of carbon atoms - with silver nanowires, to create a film which matches the performance of regular screens, but at fraction of the cost.

The material is also super flexible, so it would not need a protective glass coating, meaning the top layer of the screen could be made of something far more bendy and less breakable, such as acrylic.